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It's an amazing thing when pop music expresses beauty through ambiguity. After being pummeled over the head for years ...

It's an amazing thing when pop music expresses beauty through ambiguity. After being pummeled over the head for years ...

The Microphones: The Glow, Pt. 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/5269-the-glow-pt-2/

The Glow, Pt. 2

It's an amazing thing when pop music expresses beauty through ambiguity. After being pummeled over the head for years and years with I Love Yous and You Are So Beautifuls, the most direct way of expressing images of love and beauty have pretty much lost all impact. Melodic tricks can wear thin just as easily. Hooks are all well and good, but when you've seen a hook enough times, you know not to bite. Perhaps the problem is that most pop music doesn't put enough faith in the listener. Everything must be laid out in the most obvious of terms, and eventually, that obviousness obscures whatever the music originally intended to convey. If you want to invoke the quiet beauty of the ocean, for example, you can write a pop song that says, "Hey, the ocean is really beautiful," or you can try to come up with a sonic approximation of that beauty. It's a huge undertaking to attempt to capture something so visual in a song. But for Phil Elvrum, it seems to be second nature. The Glow Pt. 2, the follow-up to last year's gorgeous brainmelt It Was Hot, We Stayed In the Water, captures the sea, the sky, and the mountains in a sonic panorama that seems to live without beginning or end. A sprawling, swirling composition that is both as varied and as consistent as the landscape itself, The Glow Pt. 2 exceeds even its predecessor in capturing the simultaneous wrath and fragility of nature. And sounding really, really cool. Like It Was Hot's "The Pull" before it, "I Want Wind to Blow" opens with subtle manipulations of acoustic guitars across stereo channels. There's an amazing sense of open space to the track as overtones from a low, rhythmic rumble, and from the stereo acoustic guitars, create a wash of barely audible noise floating through the mid-frequencies. "I Want Wind to Blow," like a good portion of The Glow Pt. 2, uses repetition and understatement to transform itself from a simple song into a landscape. And as with any landscape, the way the songs on The Glow Pt. 2 are perceived greatly affects the impact of the record. This album simply must be listened to on headphones. Hearing the record on regular speakers is like staring at the Grand Canyon through a Viewmaster. The illusion of depth is weak at best, and easily broken. With headphones, the sounds contained within the record absolutely come to life, bouncing and slithering from ear to ear. The use of stereo panning is as integral a part of the disc as the melodies and instrumentation. With this stereo enhancement, parts of The Glow Pt. 2 are absolutely breathtaking. And perhaps the single most breathtaking song on the album is its title track, which may or may not be a thematic follow-up to "The Glow," the 11-minute-long centerpiece of It Was Hot, We Stayed In the Water. Opening with blasts of fuzzy guitar and massive drums, "The Glow Pt. 2" segues somewhat abruptly into another segment of stereo acoustic guitars, before giving way to a drop-dead gorgeous wash of multitracked organs. On top of this, Elvrum lets loose what could be the most striking lyrics he's ever penned: "I faced death. I went in with my arms swinging. But I heard my own breath and had to face that I'm still living. I'm still flesh. I hold on to awful feelings. I'm not dead... My chest still draws breath. I hold it. I'm buoyant. There's no end." Elvrum delivers these lyrics in a melodic stream-of-consciousness style that's structured enough to be musically riveting, but loose enough to sound spontaneous and sincere. As the last words of the song fade, the swell of organs segues into a trebly acoustic guitar and hi-hat section highly reminiscent of early Modest Mouse. Nowhere on this album are there short, straightforward pop songs like It Was Hot's cover of Eric's Trip "Sand" or "Karl Blau." Instead, the record ebbs and flows gracefully between fragile acoustic numbers like "Headless Horseman," and overpowering swells of noise, with all points in between represented. The flow between songs on The Glow Pt. 2 is absolutely flawless-- the album functions as one giant piece of music as well as it does a collection of songs. Themes of flesh and blood, water and wood, and life and death permeate the record, connecting well enough to create a sense of something greater without beating you over the head with its concept. Ultimately, The Glow Pt. 2 is the sound of one man working through a changing landscape-- a single voice challenging its surroundings while also accepting that it's powerless to alter them. The disc ends with a throbbing heartbeat, the most basic sign of life having braved through the stormy trek that precedes it. The Glow Pt. 2 is unpredictable, volatile, vibrant, terrifying, and comforting. The Glow Pt. 2 is alive.

2001-09-10T02:01:40.000-04:00

2001-09-10T02:01:40.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

K

September 10, 2001

034f671a-820b-4968-8b00-667778cbf2b9

Matt LeMay

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/

On her first solo album, Giant Drag singer Annie Hardy fills every song with palpable grief. It is a brave, angry, and mournful album that captures the manic energy of her musical past.

On her first solo album, Giant Drag singer Annie Hardy fills every song with palpable grief. It is a brave, angry, and mournful album that captures the manic energy of her musical past.

Annie Hardy: Rules

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23068-rules/

Rules

The first image most people saw of Annie Hardy was a striking one: A young woman in a striped polo with her lips slightly upturned, holding a steak knife poised over her thigh. It was the cover image for her band Giant Drag’s 2005 debut Hearts and Unicorns, and that idea, the innocent with murderous intent, was a pretty good reflection of what you would find inside the jewel case. Twelve years on, the same the woman looking into the camera in 2017 wears darker lipstick, more elaborate outfits, and a world-weary demeanor. Rules, her first solo album, captures the manic energy that made Giant Drag so exhilarating while infusing it with more depth. About five years ago, at 30, Hardy’s years as a rock hellion had dimmed; Because her relationship with her partner Robert Paulson was stable, she gave up music. Quickly, it all unraveled. Seventeen days after her son Silvio was born, he died of SIDS. About a year later, Paulson died of a drug overdose. The trauma of such a loss often incapacitating: they’re gone, so there isn’t much you can do. In need of a release, Hardy gravitated back to her guitar after Silvio’s death, and the songs she wrote coalesced into a project after Robert’s. Her grief is palpable here, but Rules doesn’t bob in the wake of tragedy, it is as angry as it is mournful. Part of this is due to her distinctive voice: equal parts Loretta Lynn and Lydia Lunch, her sultry caterwaul is severely emotional. In angry moments, she can scream a lyric; in somber ones, her voice cracks timorously. On “Shadow Mode,” the record’s centerpiece of rage, she does both when she delivers this couplet: “I scream like a willow out on the shore/‘Where is this man? He comes no more!’” The line is simple enough to serve as a vehicle for pure sensation. The punk of some of her backing musicians populates the margins; crashing like Dan Bolles of the Germs on the drums or boozy like Stephen McBean’s Pink Mountaintops. But due to her songwriting, the organs and the riffs, the songs are more like country torch songs than punk per se. Country funk-influenced first single “Want” transforms a pretty standard pop trope (“I want my baby back”) into a pendulous primal yelp for her child. She walks a line between naive simplicity and ambiguous spirituality. Like the blues music her songs recall, an undertone of gospel sneaks through, and it’s probably the biggest departure from her work with Giant Drag. More than a few songs sound like hymnals you can imagine hearing in a very alternative church. This interest in spirituality culminates on the song “Jesus Loves Me,” a thin ballad, like the Velvet Underground, that features a tender violin line from That Dog’s Petra Haden. The song concerns a skeptic’s favorite argument, the idea that Jesus loves everyone but most people’s lives are pretty awful. At its climax, she yelps “Revelations 3:19,” perhaps the strangest implication of bible verse since Stone Cold Steve Austin took on John 3:16. The verse reads, in the King James, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.” She’s sorry for the things she’s done, but she's aware that it’s not really her fault. Out of unspeakable grief, Annie Hardy made a seriously profound album while holding onto her peculiarities. Even the silence between the songs is impressive. Its most haunting refrain is a “But it’s all right” she repeats throughout “Mockingbird,” one of the songs that refers directly to her son’s death. It’s difficult to believe, but on Rules she does the unimaginable job of turning that rotten fruit into dark wine.

2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-04-10T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Full Psycho / American Primitive

April 10, 2017

035827ad-ae5b-4ad2-942d-a83331077260

Erin Vanderhoof

https://pitchfork.com/staff/erin-vanderhoof/

The German producer Brian Müller has a preternatural feel for the dancefloor, and his latest is a shining hybrid of breakbeats and ambient textures, making it one of the best dance records of the year.

The German producer Brian Müller has a preternatural feel for the dancefloor, and his latest is a shining hybrid of breakbeats and ambient textures, making it one of the best dance records of the year.

Skee Mask: Compro

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/skee-mask-compro/

Compro

Revivalism and dance culture aren’t a great match. Obsessing over the past feels misguided in a scene whose stated mission has always been to shake loose the future. In the early ’10s, a variety of producers started releasing music that toyed with the conventions of old-school drum and bass. Some tracks felt inspired, while others skimmed the surface of the sound without adding much. For a young talent like Munich producer Bryan Müller (aka Skee Mask), a challenge emerged: how to engage with the beloved, vast ’90s dance canon of hardcore music, Amen breaks, and ambient techno, without resorting to facile nostalgia. The best Skee Mask songs do exactly this; they don’t sound quite like anything else. Müller’s use of both analog and digital tools creates a raw hybrid energy. Throughout his latest album Compro, drums land with a spongy bounce, while pads exude rich notes of fungal modular squelch. The combination lends much of the album an organic texture that, in the vein of classic Aphex Twin records, hints at technology from an ancient future—one born of a great cataclysm of the past. Compro is Müller’s second full-length for Ilian Tape, the German label which has become known for using techno as a jumping off point for incorporating breakbeats. After several releases under the name SCNTST, Müller put out his debut Serum EP on Ilian Tape in 2014 under a new, secret moniker: Skee Mask. Ostensibly a dub techno release, it incorporated slivers of breakbeat, which Müller would expand on for Skee Mask’s excellent 2016 debut LP, Shred. By then, breakbeat mania had moved into some of techno’s most rarefied spaces, and Shred captured intersecting trends, becoming one of the year’s breakout releases for clubgoers of many stripes. Compro enriches, refines, and expands upon his entire aesthetic which he’s been honing since he started producing as a 17-year-old. Müller has a rare gift for ambient interludes, which can often feel gratuitous on full-length dance records. The album’s calmer moments are important to its whole biochemistry: “Cerroverb,” for instance, starts with an inhalation, a drawn breath gathering oxygen to burn. Wet flapping noises evoke something scaly hooked up to electrodes in a vat, a biological power source, like the fleshy chimeras in Cronenberg’s eXistenz. Tesla coils and solar arrays hum somewhere out of sight. Guitar notes reverberate in the air like sparking wires pulled taut by a pneumatic winch. “Cerroverb” is the sound of Skee Mask charging up. Perhaps Compro’s most revealing predecessor is The Self Evident Truth of an Intuitive Mind, a bug-eyed 1995 classic by hardcore hero Marc Royal under his alias T.Power that embedded labyrinthine breakbeats within wooly ambient passages and acid freakouts. Nowhere is this more obvious than the three-song stretch at the album’s center. “Soundboy Ext.” takes off like a windsurfer with a solar sail. Towering pads evoke interstellar winds rendered with warm analog grain, as if the Hubble Telescope shot footage on 35-millimeter. The drums don’t feel like they’re driving the track. Instead, they seem to be sliding off the pads, carving down the crest of a particle wave. The break twists through precise filters and shifts, course adjustments by an onboard AI charting a trajectory between star systems. If “Soundboy Ext.” endorses graceful high-tech optimism, “Dial 274,” paints a thrilling narrative about the opposite. It starts with an alarm, then a Reese bassline starts growling. Lasers squeal, metal shrieks. Containment has failed: Radioactive goo leaks from the reactor. Only the breakbeat maintains its loop, spinning off like a rogue washing machine. Scything jets of sound capture slow-motion infrastructural collapse. The Reese hiccups and spits liquid metal. Then the atonal magma is shot through with jeweled synth shafts, patches of sky seen through a caved-in roof. You finally roll to a stop and open your eyes. The camera pans up: “VLI” is a weightless drone shot, surveying acres of devastation. It’s just a pulsing tone and a few incandescent pads. But it captures something essential about post-apocalyptic solitude. A cloud of dust hangs over the rubble, sliced into shards by forest light. It’s the logical conclusion to a suite of music that perhaps mirrors Müller’s prediction for the next few centuries of life on Earth: technological confidence leads to a staggering wipe-out, and finally, post-human peace. Compro continues with a few tunes that feel like an homage to some beloved influences including vintage Blue Note anthems like Peshay’s “Sunrise” and Soichi Terada’s 1996 odyssey “Mt. Ambient vs Spasm.” They’re beautiful, if a bit familiar. But then Skee Mask displays something unexpected, especially for a Bavarian techno act: a sense of humor. “Muk FM” opens with a sample of a stentorian radio announcer discussing Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga in German. The sample warps and fades, giving way to an electro onslaught. It’s a sharp riff about how silly and beautiful our pop culture moment might look to a far-future trash heap sifter, like Wall-E dancing to his VHS of Hello, Dolly! Despite Compro’s wild tonal variations and interludes, Müller never takes his eyes off the incentives and demands of club music. This record’s emotional valence—between collapse and grace, unity and emptiness—will resonate with anyone who's ever caught an unexpected sunrise in a concrete room. Yet his depth and clarity of vision resists formula. Making music “to get lost in” is overrated—Compro takes you somewhere new.

2018-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-17T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Ilian Tape

May 17, 2018

03588fc8-9a02-4ad6-be9b-51e802ed3a22

Ezra Marcus

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ezra-marcus/

The trumpeter and composer’s 1977 solo debut, reissued on remastered vinyl, retains its uncanny narcotic power and elemental beauty decades on.

The trumpeter and composer’s 1977 solo debut, reissued on remastered vinyl, retains its uncanny narcotic power and elemental beauty decades on.

Jon Hassell: Vernal Equinox

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jon-hassell-vernal-equinox/

Vernal Equinox

When Jon Hassell coined the term “Fourth World” to describe his work, he fabricated a musical universe that new artists still call home. Melding the work of minimalists like La Monte Young and Terry Riley with non-Western folk, avant-garde classical and electronic, and early-’70s electric Miles Davis, the trumpeter and composer arrived more or less fully formed in 1977 with his solo debut Vernal Equinox. Originally released on Lovely Music, the label most famous for putting out the music of experimental composer-performer Robert Ashley, Vernal Equinox condensed everything Hassell had to offer the avant-garde of the late ‘70s in a petri dish. Despite his future decades of evolution, there is an uncanny narcotic power and elemental beauty to that first record, which is now being reissued on remastered vinyl and CD by Hassell’s Ndeya records imprint. Before releasing his album, Hassell studied for three years with the Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath. With his queasy and heavily manipulated trumpet figures, Hassell hoped to evoke the microtonal quality of Nath’s singing, but from the beginning, Hassell was careful to set his music apart from any discrete tradition. The record’s traditional folk instruments come from South Africa, South America, the Middle East, and elsewhere. The tambourine-like kanjira is the sole Indian instrument, turned to granular static by electronic processing (“Hex”). On opener “Toucan Ocean,” Brazilian percussionist Naná Vasconcelos introduces the primary rhythmic element on the album—the conga—in its first moments, keeping time with a lengthy, repeated rhythmic pattern and a simple shaker. Hassell’s ensemble introduces electric piano chords, grainy samples of ocean waves, and other effects to gradually build intensity. ”Toucan Ocean” is the only song on the album to which you can reasonably nod your head. Hassell’s music often feels propulsive, but its rhythmic architecture is deceptively fluid and unstable. On most tracks, flurries of percussion—sometimes acoustic, sometimes blurs of digital noise—cluster together into little pockets of free time and chaos. Instead of providing the music’s rhythmic backbone, the album’s percussionists create ambient sounds that match the music’s scrambled synth motifs and samples in importance. Texture becomes its own organizational principle; a slew of disparate elements combine to form one gently vibrating mass. Hassell’s trumpet is at the center of everything, as bent out of recognition as everything else. His elaborate effects chains create speech-like sounds, and his tone often becomes overwhelmed by the sound of his breath. On heavily processed tracks like “Hex” and “Viva Shona,” ping-ponging electronic dots and dashes nearly crowd him out of the mix. However, both “Blues Nile” and the album’s main event—the 21-minute long title track—distill Hassell’s artistry to its most fundamental elements: percussion, drone, and trumpet. He embellishes one or two notes insistently, creating tiny, detuned flutters that evoke a call to prayer for a non-existent religion. The simplicity and intimacy of these compositions is unusual in Hassell’s catalog. Hassell would dig into the more pop-friendly implications of his world-music-like experiments on his Earthquake Island album of the following year. His ensuing collaborations with Brian Eno (who contributes liner notes to this reissue), Peter Gabriel, and David Sylvian in the ‘80s would demonstrate how well Hassell’s style slotted in with other mini-movements in the electronic and art-rock music world. His discography of the ’90s and ’00s would evince restraint and control. But no other entry in Hassell’s catalog has Vernal Equinox’s sense of excitement and discovery, palpable with the introduction of each brilliant new sound.

2020-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental

Ndeya

March 23, 2020

035a06a6-c3de-4523-a4e5-fc82cafbcca6

Winston Cook-Wilson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/

Strokes singer makes his solo bow with a record of post-millennial synth-pop.

Strokes singer makes his solo bow with a record of post-millennial synth-pop.

Julian Casablancas: Phrazes for the Young

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13666-phrazes-for-the-young/

Phrazes for the Young

In 2002, the Strokes played their song "Take It or Leave It" on "The Late Show With David Letterman". The performance was so incredible it almost seems unfair. In it, a 23-year old Julian Casablancas manhandled his mic stand, eyed the camera with a hypnotic mix of rage and anxiety, and tugged at his jacket as if he was about to burst. At one point, Casablancas swatted his mic down and left the stage in a huff only to return exactly as guitarist Albert Hammond, Jr. wrapped up a brief solo. Chaos; control. At the end of the song, the singer tripped, completely wiped out in the middle of the stage, and somehow ended up even cooler for it. The "Letterman" blitz showed the Strokes at full tilt-- a rock band that set the pace for what a rock band should look, sound, and feel like in a new millennium. In 2009, a 31-year-old Julian Casablancas played his solo song "11th Dimension" with a band that wasn't the Strokes on "The Tonight Show With Conan O'Brien". The performance just seemed unfair. In it, the singer had no mic stand, eyed the camera as if he were scared and/or lost, and hunched through some of the song like he was trying to hide himself. At one point, he awkwardly pretended to roll some dice. During an atrocious circus-organ solo, Casablancas just idled in the middle of the stage. There was no chance of him falling over because he barely moved. Perhaps it's unfair to gauge Casablancas against his younger self, but this is a star whose entire currency is based on a youthful brand of Lower East Side punk rebellion that's too cool to actually rebel. Considering the uncertain future of the Strokes-- "a band is a good way to break up a friendship," said Casablancas in a recent interview-- and the fact that the group's last album, 2006's First Impressions of Earth, was something of a shit sandwich, there's more riding on the singer's solo bow than he'd probably like to admit. Phrazes for the Young is a jumble of contradictions. The music and artwork is steeped in 1970s and 1980s tropes yet also vaguely futuristic. The words are apocalyptic, depressing, and sometimes worthy of a zen self-help manual, and while there are only eight songs, this thing seems to go on forever. The "Conan" performance was not a momentary blunder-- this album is overstuffed with production do-dads, yet disappointingly devoid of anything coming close to the sort of tossed-off brilliance this guy used to come up with during an afternoon nap. The title of Phrazes for the Young was based on a series of Oscar Wilde one-liners called Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young. Among the witticisms are gems like, "Pleasure is the only thing one should live for. Nothing ages like happiness," and "In all unimportant matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential. In all important matters, style, not sincerity, is the essential." But instead of continuing with Wilde's flighty "words of wisdom," Casablancas takes the "from on high" elder statesman attitude but ditches any and all traces of humor. So we get a batch of anti-pleasure, anti-happiness parables that are often too sincere for their own good. Opener "Out of the Blue" has Casablancas reeling off a list of downers-- sadness, bitterness, anger, vengeance-- before settling with premature nostalgia: "All that I can do is sing a song of faded glory," he admits. Meanwhile, "Left & Right in the Dark" is even more dire as the singer offers lines like, "We're in a race against time, and time might be winning," before imploring the world at large (or is it himself?) to "Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!" Here's another Wilde phrase worth re-reading: "Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness." Produced by Jason Lader (Rilo Kiley, Maroon 5) and Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes), the album is comically slick and bouncy when it's not offering five-minute industrial-synth clusterfucks ("River of Brakelights") or slow-motion dirges ("Tourist"). Broken free of the stylistic constraints that come with the Strokes, Casablancas makes the classic rookie solo mistake of stuffing his songs with everything in the studio while never stepping back and realizing that a six-minute, country-synth historical lament in honor of Manhattan's Ludlow St. may be a few twangy guitar solos and plodding hooks too much. The record fares best when channeling Cyndi Lauper or the Eurythmics while keeping the tempo close to jumpy. Offstage, "11th Dimension" pumps along with endearing silliness, even if Casablancas claims he's stuck "on the frozen surface of a fireball" on the track. And the gorgeous electro ballad "Glass" finds something lovely amidst a world sadly insulated by bulletproof windows. The irony is that Phrazes for the Young is so smoothed over-- nearly all of Casablancas' trademark vocal roughness is airbrushed into oblivion-- it instantly sounds like a plexiglass-covered museum piece. At their best, the Strokes had no trouble adding spontaneity to their meticulously arranged pop-rock songs. Phrazes leaves no room for such spur-of-the-moments. And, when coupled with Casablancas' often-suffocating, old-timer sentiments, the record allows itself only brief glimmers of life. "The ages live in history through their anachronisms," wrote Wilde in his Phrases and Philosophies. And, at this rate, this one-time wunderkind risks becoming little more than an emblem of the past if he can't figure out how to harness the present once again.

2009-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00

2009-11-05T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic / Rock

RCA

November 5, 2009

035f195c-5fae-43e6-a2f4-099a24fce511

Ryan Dombal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/

Refreshed and refocused after a three-year absence, Chicago hip-hop icon Common rebounds from 2002's disasterous psych- hop odyssey Electric Circus: Easily ranking with Resurrection and Like Water for Chocolate, Be stands among his best work to date.

Refreshed and refocused after a three-year absence, Chicago hip-hop icon Common rebounds from 2002's disasterous psych- hop odyssey Electric Circus: Easily ranking with Resurrection and Like Water for Chocolate, Be stands among his best work to date.

Common: Be

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1566-be/

Be

Notice Lonnie Lynn's expression on the cover of his new record. It's not a smirk or a simper or even a smile-- it's a full-on grin. Bathed in a golden hue, the image is an instant-vintage snapshot of the sincerity and canny idealism that has marked Common's 13-year hip-hop career. As other MCs fall by the conscious curbside due to nascent acting careers (Mos Def, Andre 3000) or misguided mainstream pleas (Talib Kweli, the Roots), this Chicago native rebounds from 2002's botched hip-hop-flower-child experiment Electric Circus with the help of fellow Windy City native Kanye West on Be, which comfortably ranks alongside Resurrection and Like Water for Chocolate as Common's best work to date. The album introduces itself with a few somber, contemplative notes from an upright bass. Then the heavy strings awake from their slumber and start popping. A slurring analog keyboard line slides in. Juke joint piano begins to roll. "Yes," Common says with a resounding confidence that instantly placates any holdover Electric Circus worries. Elevated by the melodic burst of the quintessential West beat, Common proceeds to dole out his State of Urban America Address: "Bush pushin' lies/ Killers immortalized/ We got arms but won't reach for the skies." With no hook and a cold Chi-town setting where "drunk nights get remembered more than sober ones," Be's intro is inviting, stern, buoyant, and level-headed all at once, establishing a theme of restrained optimism. It's deftly followed by the crack-a-lack street symphony "The Corner". "We write songs about wrong because it's hard to see right," Common intones, alongside his legendary heroes the Last Poets. Guided by the tenants of his classic hip-hop parable "I Used to Love H.E.R.", the wise MC is not preaching, just leisurely speaking, playing the world-weary yet still-hopeful ghetto documentarian. Still gazing into his daughter's eyes for inspiration as he did on Like Water for Chocolate's "The 6th Sense", Common, at the near-ancient hip-hop age of 33, refreshingly looks to generations both past and future for the answers to the big questions he's searching for on Be. Nowadays, Common won't leave you slack-jawed at his meta-metaphor verbal gymnastics. His flow is slowed and smoothed out, with understated emphasis and emotion taking the place of young-buck flashiness. The lack of instant-gratification couplets may disappoint at first, but each verse's rewarding intricacies become more evident with multiple listens. Sonically, Be is utterly listenable: With just 11 songs in 42 minutes (including Pop's rap), the record is as succinct as its title. Be's brevity is not only welcomed but almost iconoclastic. Making the album speed by even faster is the intrinsic sense of continuity provided by West and the like-minded J Dilla. The famed dropout's nine tracks feature his signature sound with slight unconventional arrangement twists and scratch-down turns that prevent dull uniformity: Instead of a third verse on the two-sided adulterous saga "Faithful", the song segues into a celestial duet with John Legend tethered to the hook while wily eccentric Bilal soars above with his melismatic vocal theatrics. Once a pupil of Chicago producer No I.D., who helped construct Common's early boom-bap sound, West does his mentor proud on Be, exuberantly pushing his one-time lyrical foe to unleash superior oratory skills while cutting-and-pasting archaic soul samples from forgotten artists such as gospel-tinged loverman DJ Rogers ("Faithful") and familial funk group Cornelius Brothers & Sister Rose ("Chi City"). Aside from the horn-laden "Real People", which nicks 70s organist Caesar Frazier's "Sweet Children" wholesale, West once again proves himself to be an inventive, natural talent behind the boards, as on "The Food," which flips the opening notes of Sam Cooke's "Nothing Can Change This Love" for its infectious piano loop. There are no skippable songs on Be, but one decision disrupts the album's admirably consistent 68-degrees-in-the-shade vibe: The inclusion of the "Chappelle's Show" version of "The Food". Though the live take has an intensity missing on the studio version (released on vinyl last year), the Chappelle introduction and opening and closing applause pull the listener out of Be's palpable Southside surroundings. The album would have been better served by a redone studio take on the tune, which had the potential to be one of Be's finest. Picayune flaws aside, the album's appeal stems from Common's passionate honesty. This invigorating trait means ballads like "Love Is..." and "It's Your World" don't melt into mush. The former sees him talking tender over a sinuous J Dilla beat that layers airy Marvin Gaye vocal samples atop each other to sublime effect. "Some say that I'm a dreamer because I talk about it often/ Seen the hardest nigga soften with his homey in a coffin," he says, admitting his romantic weaknesses while concurrently highlighting the inevitable downsides of such boundless affections. The latter features an unflinching, detailed narrative chronicling a downtrodden Midwestern prostitute's sympathetic plight: "I remember in high school, she had a passion to sing/ Now she see herself in her casket in dreams." The woman's tale can be seen as a dreadful sequel to hip-hop's own plight in "I Used to Love H.E.R." More than a decade after that distillation of the pitfalls of the culture, hip-hop continues to relish in the violent and abusive tropes at an increasingly overt level. Still, Common lends power and self-worth to the character in "It's Your World", hoping she can use it to her advantage-- but also realizing her fate may be sealed. "She still wanna see California," he concludes. Whether she ever makes it is left lovingly, realistically unanswered.

2005-05-31T01:00:01.000-04:00

2005-05-31T01:00:01.000-04:00

Rap

Geffen

May 31, 2005

0360da94-5e14-49ee-ac93-792f5d6a03db

Ryan Dombal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/

Chief Keef's breakthrough mixtape, is loud, rough, and unrelenting, but the 16-year-old Chicago rapper's calm, dead-eyed delivery is its most unsettling and intriguing element.

Chief Keef's breakthrough mixtape, is loud, rough, and unrelenting, but the 16-year-old Chicago rapper's calm, dead-eyed delivery is its most unsettling and intriguing element.

Chief Keef: Back From the Dead

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16497-back-from-the-dead/

Back From the Dead

The music of Chicago MC Chief Keef will sound intimately familiar to anyone that has heard a rap album or listened to the radio in the past few years. Back From the Dead, his breakthrough mixtape, is loud, rough, unrelenting, lurching, and undeniably the child of Waka Flocka Flame and producer Lex Luger's indelible Flockaveli. Considering Keef is 16 years old, you could almost use the world "child" literally. But for all its familiarity, the mixtape is noticeably alien, with the young Keef leaving behind Flocka's headbanging intensity for a delivery and presence that is unsettlingly calm and unemotional. Back From the Dead likely refers to Keef's recently being released from prison, where he served a few weeks for allegedly firing a gun at Chicago police officers. But if you read the title more literally to mean that Keef is something like a zombie, it's maybe even more appropriate. Surrounded by beats from producer Young Chop that are stuffed with the sound of gunshots and Keef's choice ad-lib, "bang bang," he's close to stoic throughout, stalking expressionless through the streets. We usually think of this type of music as fight music or party music, and though Keef's singles certainly don't inspire people to stand and stare at each other, his dead-eyed delivery gives post-crunk music a decidedly new vibe, one that goes about threatening the listener not through aggression, but the chilling lack thereof. The aggressive antisociality that fueled Flockaveli or the 2004 self-titled debut album from Atlanta teens Crime Mob is internalized and subsumed on Back From the Dead, and it's evident immediately on the lead-off track "Monster", where amongst a hail of bullets and rolling hi-hats Keef coolly raps, "We just do our thang, and the feds watching/ All we do is turn up, we some damn monsters." It continues from there-- on "My Niggas" he more or less talks his way through the chorus ("Please don't disrespect my niggas/ Cause we gon' squeeze a lot of fucking triggers") and on "Winnin'" he issues the album's most direct threat: "Fuck with my family, and you are finished." Neither the sentiment nor the wording is unfamiliar in the context of street rap, but Keef's laissez-faire approach to the type of things that most rappers seethe about has breathed new life into a sound that is still dominating rap despite a stretch of diminishing returns. Keef's calling card is his innate laid-back aura, but the mixtape succeeds thanks to more than just that. For one, he may just have one of the most singular flows in rap, a bouncy cadence that often finds him trampolining on the last syllable of his lines. He displays this best on the single "I Don't Like", where he uses Young Chop's bass drum as a springboard to punctuate what may be the catchiest rap chorus of the year. Rappers such as Pusha T, Meek Mill, and Wiz Khalifa have all already taken to Twitter to shout out Keef's music, and it wouldn't be a surprise to hear his flow slowly infiltrate the rap world. Then there's Young Chop, who recently signed a publishing deal with Warner Bros., and with good reason. His beats are as musical as they are hellbent on destruction, and many of the tape's best songs ("I Don't Like", "Save That Shit") are driven by his melodic ear. Keef is on the verge of becoming a very big deal, and Back From the Dead will serve as a visible reflection of both a city that has seen an obscene number of murders in 2012, and the sound that has been the backbone of rap music for years running. As sociology, the mixtape reinforces just how and why violence is rooted in underclass communities, and though Keef has already been blamed for its perpetuation, at the age of 16, he's still years away from fully understanding the context in which his music exists. As art, the tape shows that, despite continued oversaturation, the music that Waka hath wrought still has interesting places to go.

2012-04-12T02:00:01.000-04:00

2012-04-12T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rap

April 12, 2012

0363ffc9-c426-49d6-814c-780d80bf8bf9

Jordan Sargent

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/

The Roots' 13th album, which includes a brief, four-part orchestral suite that builds off a Sufjan Stevens piece, is definitely their most downbeat. It's a concept record that tells the story of a man dying, in reverse.

The Roots' 13th album, which includes a brief, four-part orchestral suite that builds off a Sufjan Stevens piece, is definitely their most downbeat. It's a concept record that tells the story of a man dying, in reverse.

The Roots: Undun

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16102-the-roots-undun/

Undun

Undun is the story of a man, Redford Stevens, dying in reverse, rewinding from the moment he became a statistic and hitting the points in his life where he's at his most self-aware. That he's a criminal who got caught up in the familiar street-hustle trappings that the modern media's documented countless times is a pivotal detail-- it's hit at an angle that seems to emphasize the futile inevitability of it all. His life could be any number of misdirected narratives that ends with a toe tag, and what details listeners learn about him are hazy, buried under archetypal turns of fate and decisive struggles. That this protagonist is a fictionalized composite of a handful of real people, filtered through a matter-of-fact narrative that splits character ambivalence with journalistic impartiality, only makes his lack of direction and the failure of any real closure stand out even more. "Lotta niggas go to prison," Dice Raw states on "Tip the Scale", "how many come out Malcolm X?" So the Roots' latest album isn't a sprawling, rise-and-fall crime story, not a condemnation or a veneration of a man living outside the law, not a bullet-riddled grand guignol heavy on explicit details of soldiers getting cut down. It's a character study of a man whose existential crisis ends only with his death-- a death gone largely unspecified, the glamor and tragedy washed over with a doomed resignation. That's a hard thing to pull off, even for a band as given to deep-thinking concepts as the Roots are. And when your main lyrical catalyst is Black Thought-- a man more given to allusions than direct statements-- it's likely that it'll take a while for the full scope of Undun to really sink in. If and when it does, it might strike listeners as a bit skeletal: omit the mood-setting instrumental bookends, including a brief, four-part orchestral suite that builds off Sufjan Stevens' "Redford (For Yia-Yia and Pappou)", and you've got maybe a half hour's worth of material. By ?uestlove's accounts, writing Redford's story introduced the headaches and challenges that come with scriptwriting into their songwriting, and what's left on Undun is the end result of frequent revisions and rewrites that attempt to reconcile character, theme, and continuity. If it comes at the expense of nuance, it's not always obvious: There's an easy-to-trace narrative line from Redford's acceptance of his fate ("Sleep") to his acknowledgement of how close it's approaching ("Make My"), back through declarations of aggravated toughness ("One Time"), and celebratory fatalism ("Kool On"), along ups and downs that juxtapose motivation ("Stomp") and helplessness ("Lighthouse"). When the vocal portion of the album ends with two of the bleakest sets of verses in the Roots discography, peaking with the estrangement of "I Remember" and the desperation of "Tip the Scale", Undun reveals itself as a story where a man's actual death isn't quite as tragic as the circumstances that pushed him to it. The catch is that the inevitable familiarity of this storyline, even in the service of a deep emotional study, is almost an end in itself-- a cycle seen far too often, played out in terms anyone who's ever been or known someone with their back against the wall can understand. And if Undun succeeds at putting one man's criminal-world struggle with free will and fate in empathetic terms, it does so at the expense of any unique details or unusual traits that would set him apart-- Redford is humanized, but he's not entirely individualized. If you've bought an Apple device in the last couple of years, you can download a free app that includes some world-building video clips and photos that give him more of a full-life context. If you're still relying on a Blackberry and a clickwheel iPod, you're left with the voices of Black Thought, Dice Raw, and the now-more-googleable Greg Porn to fill in most of the blanks. They're admirable technicians and can be charismatic on their own terms, but voicing raw emotion isn't a major strength for any of them. What you do get is a heightened sense of perplexed frustration, and there are times when Black Thought actually hits another level in his lyrics to meet it. A resilient, on-the-grind turn of phrase like "I'm never sleeping like I'm on methamphtamines/ Move like my enemy 10 steps ahead of me" ("Kool On") is delivered with the same emphasis as a bitter, regretful line like "I'll leave the memories here, I won't need them/ If I stop thinking and lie, now that's freedom" ("Lighthouse"). But if that's one of the reasons Undun feels almost relentless in its singleminded dejection, it's also proof that, if Black Thought can't always push through a sentiment with his voice, he can at least deliver the fuck out of an idea. The other MCs in the Roots' core provide some welcome shifts in tone: Greg Porn's nasal drone often slips into bluntly nihilistic imagery ("Put the knife in ya back cut down to the red meat/ Daddy should've let me be a stain on the bed sheets"), and Dice Raw's rapper/singer double-threat role continues to provide a heart of much-needed pathos. His closing line on "One Time" might be the most pitch-perfect moment of film noir cynicism on the album: "To make it to the bottom, such a high climb." When Phonte and Big K.R.I.T. deliver guest verses that still feel like relative afterthoughts, it's a bit disappointing, but they come strong enough to keep the album's fated, introspective mood consistent. There's one other aspect to Undun that gives it a sense of ambivalence, even if it's a minor and comparative one: The music itself feels less immediate. After How I Got Over channeled frustrated, brooding soul toward a gradual expansion into triumphant liveliness, the limited palette of down-to-mid-tempo dirges here feels almost stiflingly gloomy. Which means it works-- if this album is a cinematic experience, the score here fills in the cues for moods that the MCs mostly just suggest. The drums-and-keys structure feels more delicate and less urgent than the Roots' best meditative moments, and what few tracks there are with some kick to them-- the burbly guitar-driven "Kool On", the worried funk of "Lighthouse"-- have more of a pull in their chorus than anything in the instrumentation does. Yet the cumulative effect of all that mournful weight is effective enough in the story's service. And in the run-up to "Tip the Scale", a string-accented elegy loosely reminiscent of "You Got Me", the idea comes across that any glimmer of optimism in this album would be beside the point. This isn't the Roots' most accessible album, and it's definitely their most downbeat, but it comes from a place that isn't always easy to dwell.

2011-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

2011-12-06T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Def Jam

December 6, 2011

03647311-e923-4f5f-921f-bf193c13cbd2

Nate Patrin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/

Through decayed beats and gothic atmospheres, the musician formerly known as Aristophanes transforms sexual desire into an existential threat.

Through decayed beats and gothic atmospheres, the musician formerly known as Aristophanes transforms sexual desire into an existential threat.

潘Pan: Pan the Pansexual

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/pan-pan-the-pansexual/

Pan the Pansexual

For 潘PAN, the body is a bomb about to explode. On the 2015 Grimes track “Scream,” her voice fluttered across Mandarin lyrics about howls packed deep in the lungs like gunpowder; between delicate rap verses, she let those subdued screams erupt. The Taiwanese musician born Pan Wei Ju, previously known as Aristophanes, has toyed with the boundary between composed beauty and volcanic monstrosity ever since. On Pan the Pansexual, her first full-length release since renaming herself, 潘PAN turns her attention toward the existential threat of sexual desire, and how its satisfaction can liquefy one’s sense of identity just as easily as it can crystalize it. In 2017, 潘PAN followed her indelible Grimes feature with the mixtape Humans Become Machines, a lively, populous release that showcased a wide range of vocal moods: playful, introspective, frenetic, furious. It was a colorful affair. By contrast, Pan the Pansexual crouches in an unrelentingly bleak corner. Its beats lurch and scuttle, decaying out of time, drumming up echoes of 2010s goth records like Gazelle Twin’s Unflesh. On “Embers,” 潘PAN raps in Mandarin and sings in English over a jazzy loop whose swung rhythm scrapes against the oppressive atmosphere. The skittering cymbals hint at levity, but the synthesizer washes and pained lyrics hover in the gloom. “If I somehow die in my endless depression, I want all my beautiful illusions keep alive,” she sings in a breathy upper register while a minor-key piano figure twinkles deep in the fog. On “Reborn,” one of two tracks produced by cloud rap phenom Clams Casino, 潘PAN braids together wordless keens that call to mind Jarboe’s solo work. Here, she envisions new life emerging from violent death: “Choke me slowly with your old scars/Make me bloom once again with your blood,” she sings right before a string interlude injects a sense of old-world gothic romance into Clams’ digital static. Similar tensions simmer throughout the album. When they do resolve, they pour forth in a fury. On “FNGRMEHRDR,” over a bassline descended from Le Tigre’s electroclash classic “Deceptacon,” 潘PAN sings about a voracious desire that belies deeper longing: “I never, ever felt this lonely/Fuck it, finger me harder.” Her Mandarin lyrics, delivered at a more agitated clip, depict a totally alienated sexual encounter. “My bones are soft like mud now, my consciousness collapses, when you kiss me like the way flood spreads,” she raps. “I turned out to be a lonely person since I met you... you are making me incomplete.” Pan the Pansexual arrives during the summer of Chappell Roan and Billie Eilish, two artists who sing about queer sex as neon relief from uncertainty and repression. Roan’s “Red Wine Supernova” is an outpouring of sensual joy, while Eilish’s “LUNCH” hits like a long exhale at the end of a breath held for years. 潘PAN’s own grappling with sexual identity traces a more tortured path. What if pursuing your secret hunger didn’t calm the incalculable questions writhing in your mind, but only deepened them? What if getting off didn’t actually mean getting out? That’s the fear weighing heavy over this album—that it’s not always so easy to come home into your own body. Sometimes the bomb goes off and the question hangs in the air, unanswered.

2024-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-16T00:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Transgressive

July 16, 2024

03653f74-8b47-4a81-a6d5-263d86b4b1fb

Sasha Geffen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/

The Killers follow Sam's Town with this odds'n'sods collection, a hodgepodge of everything they've tried in the past as well as a few things they'll no doubt try again in the future.

The Killers follow Sam's Town with this odds'n'sods collection, a hodgepodge of everything they've tried in the past as well as a few things they'll no doubt try again in the future.

The Killers: Sawdust

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10937-sawdust/

Sawdust

They can be taught! What separates the Killers from contemporaries such as the Bravery and Panic! at the Disco-- and what will ensure an audience when those bands have fully fossilized-- is that the Vegas quartet can learn and adapt. While they evolved out of the Strokes' 1970s guitar strut and a flyover approximation of that band's New York-centric sense of style, the Killers have since managed to move up the evolutionary ladder, developing actual tools and displaying the capacity for reason. Sam's Town, their second rung, predicted opposable thumbs and verbal language in the band's future. The band used Springsteen to poke out even more drama from new wave, cross-breeding two very different species-- the Boss' concentrated working-class rock with effete British new wave. Surprise: It sometimes worked. On their way forward, the Killers offer a glance backward with Sawdust, a hodgepodge of everything they've tried in the past as well as a few things they'll no doubt try again in the future. With its vague title and ludicrous artwork, this catch-all gathers outtakes, B-sides, covers, Jacques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke remix of "Mr. Brightside", and a dorky hidden track that reveals their debt to Stone Temple Pilots. What the Killers haven't learned is how to dial it back: These songs, just like the albums they were recorded for, are busy with sounds and effects, as if they are aiming to deploy every studio knob or realize all of their harebrained ideas at once. Opener "Tranquilize" sounds weighted with stuff-- the typical drum-bass-guitar, of course, but also more guitars, synths both ominous and light, a children's choir, Lou Reed-- all in service to trite lyrics and bombastic melodies. Likewise, their cover of Joy Division's "Shadowplay" shoots for epic, losing the minimalist menace of the original in a maelstrom of garishly climactic instrumentation. The Killers' clunky more-is-more aesthetic derives from stadium bands like Depeche Mode, whose music had to sound good in an arena as well as on headphones. But Depeche Mode had the good sense to streamline their songs, making you listen deeply, not broadly. In this sense, Sawdust is musically dense but superficial, with seemingly no grand plan for all those sounds beyond having all those sounds. Songs like "All the Pretty Faces" and the too-wry "Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll" ramble on long after the band has spent that particular nickel, and even shorter tracks like "Under the Gun" and "Show You How" never feel concise like three-minute pop songs-- the not-so-bright side of ambition. Even the "Mr. Brightside" remix, which breaks the song down just to build it up again, reconstructs with the wrong elements and loses most of what made the original so enjoyable in the first place. On the other hand, boneheaded bombast is what the Killers do best, and they know enough not to grasp for subtlety. Because it's not a proper album and therefore not a big statement, Sawdust may actually be the Killers' loosest collection to date. Whenever listening becomes a trudge, there's a relatively off-the-cuff track like their cover of the Mel Tillis-penned, Kenny Rogers-popularized "Ruby Don't Take Your Love to Town". Buried in the back half of the album, it sounds like they recorded in a practice room, with only a few instruments at their disposal. Of course nothing the Killers do is that spontaneous, but nevertheless, they do right by the song, powered by Ronnie Vannucci's rolling beat and Brandon Flowers' slight reimagining of the chorus. Similarly, they downplay Dire Straits' "Romeo & Juliet", delivering it like a song instead of a community-theater monologue. Following in Mark Knopfler's footsteps, Flowers refuses to emote, which has wrecked other covers, and the band's understatement is appreciated. Overall, there's a strong sense of exploration on Sawdust; if the Killers don't seem to have much intuitive understanding of balance and songcraft, the overproduction at least suggests a strong musical curiosity underlying their obvious career ambitions. To date, the Killers' greatest accomplishment has been keeping their possibilities wide open, which few acts have managed to do without coming across as timid or aimless. If they can keep that up and actually go to unexpected places, regardless of the results, they'll be walking upright while other groups are still dragging their knuckles.

2007-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00

2007-11-27T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Island

November 27, 2007

03661d1a-76dd-41e9-ba63-dbdc63f26243

Stephen M. Deusner

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/

An odds-and-ends compilation with no coherent vision, Slime Season finds Young Thug rapping at a high level, but performing less consistently as a songwriter. Yet Thug remains one of hip-hop's most exciting stylists, and there are still a few career highlights here.

An odds-and-ends compilation with no coherent vision, Slime Season finds Young Thug rapping at a high level, but performing less consistently as a songwriter. Yet Thug remains one of hip-hop's most exciting stylists, and there are still a few career highlights here.

Young Thug: Slime Season

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21099-slime-season/

Slime Season

If you're new to Young Thug, don't start with Slime Season. An odds-and-ends compilation with no coherent vision, the tape finds Thug rapping at a high level, but performing less consistently as a songwriter. It's not clear he even wants to be a songwriter on all these records; one gets the impression the tape's been compiled ex post facto, a few fully-fleshed out classics mixed in with studio dross. Some feel more like workouts, perhaps cut quickly during marathon recording sessions. (Initially Slime Season was to be produced entirely by London on da Track. "Ask 300", the beatmaker tweeted—a reference to Thug's label—when questioned about the more diverse production lineup of the final tracklist.) The bulk of these songs are for Thug completists, or those convinced of his infallibility. Nevertheless, Thug remains one of hip-hop's most exciting stylists, consistent even amid inconsistency, and there are moments worth savoring. Part of the problem is that Thug's catalog has already been flooded with leaks and unofficial releases. Some of them—"Hey I" is a particular standout—are superior to many of the records here. Thug's biggest fans would be better off compiling their own greatest hits from the pile, and Thug neophytes will find this year's Barter 6 or last year's Rich Gang tape a much more consistent entryway. It's unclear why certain records made the cut and others didn't. The inclusion of Wayne feature "Take Kare" (which has been out since last year) may be yet another pointed dig at Thug's idol (the two have since had a falling out), but it was also an anticlimax. "Power", produced by London on da Track, seems like something left on the cutting room floor from the Barter sessions, and if it was, it's easy to hear why: where each Barter record made up a discrete facet of the album's sound, "Power" sounds a little bit like three of them at once—consummate filler. In the rush to fete Thug for his radical talents, it's important to draw distinctions between what records work, and which ones do not—or those which sort of work, if you look at them from the right angle. Part of the joy of his art is that you can draw together your own version of his canon from a scattered field, picking up on the pieces that most attract you. (This is not a quality limited to Thug; it's been this way since the Internet began to reward rappers, like Lil Wayne and Gucci Mane, who could flood the market without drowning in it.) The most evident gem here is "Best Friend". Its hook is inspired by a viral vine (Tokyo Vanity, the meme's creator, has released a "Best Friend" record of her own), and its surreal video is sly and artfully unpredictable. The Ricky Racks-produced record, which builds upon disorienting sound effects and hypnotic pizzicato strings, draws you in while bringing you no closer to figuring it all out, a contradiction at the heart of the Young Thug project. Thug's best songs are carefully structured, even if they appear effortlessly thrown together, and the most effective moments tend to be subtle, sidling up to the listener. Each of the song's parts—melodies, backgrounds, hooks, choruses, and flows—lock in to give the song a shape as particular as a fingerprint. Many songs on Slime Season don't chase this goal; at the album's opening, Thug's drawn to repetitive, headbanging patterns and the results are for hardcore fans only. The opening tracks, the Sonny Digital-produced trap banger "Quarterback" and the Southside-produced "Rarri", are interesting but lack replay value. A few of the harder-edged songs do work: "Freaky" might be its best experimental moment, with Wondagurl's unstructured, percussive beat bringing Thug's songcraft and improvisational rap style to the fore. But the album's true highlights don't arrive until its close, with the one-two punch of "Draw Down" and "Wood Would". On the former—which has been out for some time—Thug  strategically deploys different flows to shape the song, while his unpredictable figurative language keep the listener on their toes: "Pull up with that K out of the coupe! I like my bitch brown like a mu'fuckin' boot!" he says at one moment, or later: "Put that pussy on my head like a fuckin' Motrin!" Disguised in his squall of a delivery, they're not conveyed as jab-you-in-the-ribs punchlines; they're playful and impossible to anticipate, chasing novelty rather than cliche, lending the song an uncertain, volatile air. As for "Wood Would", it's the album's strongest, and stands among the best in his catalog. With its sample skipping like a stone as its drums slam in place, it's low-key and unassuming, evading direct translation and shifting in and out of lucidity. Yet Thug wears his heart on his sleeve through one of pop's oldest tools: an undeniable melody. It says everything he doesn't need to, as if everything you didn't know were clear as day.

2015-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-09-24T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

September 24, 2015

03683928-e2ca-4dfc-bdec-bf6547973e27

David Drake

https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/

Following the maximalism of 2010's landmark Cosmogramma, Steven Ellison returns with a comparatively subtle and focused album. Quiet re-thinks his music's relationship to space and mood with a new and welcome sense of simplicity.

Following the maximalism of 2010's landmark Cosmogramma, Steven Ellison returns with a comparatively subtle and focused album. Quiet re-thinks his music's relationship to space and mood with a new and welcome sense of simplicity.

Flying Lotus: Until the Quiet Comes

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17115-until-the-quiet-comes/

Until the Quiet Comes

Steven Ellison called his breakthrough album as Flying Lotus Los Angeles, and his music still has a strong metaphorical connection to the city. He's an admirer of producers like Dr. Dre, but Ellison's vision mixes the pulse of contemporary urban life with an extra dose of sci-fi futurism. He has his ear to the ground in terms of what's happening now and what's real, but his mind is fixated on what might happen tomorrow-- part Boyz n the Hood, part Blade Runner. And since Ellison's musical palette always circles back to the Eastern-tinged textures that infiltrated jazz when his great aunt Alice Coltrane was helping set the pace (assorted bells, harp plucks, the pings of steel and knock of wood), his music feels cosmic, bound to L.A. as a geographic idea but not necessarily of this earth. In the last five years, Flying Lotus has become a standard-bearer for 21st-century beat construction by looking forward and backward simultaneously and making music that feels like an exploration. So what happens when such an artist reaches a cul-de-sac? After Flying Lotus' 2010 landmark Cosmogramma, further density was not an option. That album was packed so tightly with rhythms, instruments, and textures that adding more to the mix would have meant risking identity; just a few more samples could have turned the music into an indistinct mush that contains every color at once. Cosmogramma felt like an end game, and the new Flying Lotus album, Until the Quiet Comes, finds Ellison lighting out in a new direction. He's thinking in terms of air, mood, and simplicity. In an interview with the UK magazine The Wire, Ellison described Quiet as his attempt at "a children's record, a record for kids to dream to." While there's nothing cute or naive on the album, you get a sense of what Ellison might mean when it comes to dreaming. The album's opening section, including "Until the Colours Come", "Heave(n)", and "All In", functions as a sort of miniature suite of downtempo jazz. This is Flying Lotus at its most vibe-heavy and mystical, where rooms are thick with purple incense and it's always 3 a.m. The sound is not new-- tracks like these were a cornerstone of 1990s trip-hop of the Headz comp/Ninja Tune variety-- but the sheer beauty of Ellison's design sets his music apart. This is a quality he shares with the very different Ricardo Villalobos: By pulling back and giving his meticulously-constructed elements room to breathe, Ellison allows us to hear them as if for the first time. "Tiny Tortures" begins with a rhythm that's all bones-- a simulated wood block, snare, and hissy cymbal tracing out an off-kilter beat. Against this backdrop the bass guitar of Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner enters, and the contrast between his gliding, harmonically rich runs and the spare opening is breathtaking. Thundercat's expressive bass work also adds character to the comparatively thick title track, as a gong and handclaps flow continuously like water over rocks while an unstable Dilla-fied keyboard wedges in between the beats. But even here, when there's more going on, the ear can fixate on any one sound and extract feeling from it. As the album progresses, it changes in feel, but the shifts are organic. If the tracks in the opening section bring to mind an abstraction of spaced-out jazz, elsewhere Ellision conjures the blocky colors of videos games. See the thick 8-bit synths in "Sultan's Request", the curlicue melody in "Putty Boy Strut", the simple refrain of the title track, which makes me think of a digital hero on a quest. These lighter moments are careful and reserved. You can feel Ellison putting a smaller frame around each individual part. The hushed world Ellison has constructed here is hermetic and internally focused, even for him, and the album's guests don't break the spell. The featured players meet Ellison on his turf and adapt to the landscape of the record. Erykah Badu's connection to Flying Lotus' broader aesthetic is readily apparent, as her sense of mystical earthiness is grounded in tradition but free to wander outside of it. On "See Thru to U", she does away with soul singing in its formal sense and allows herself to become an instrument. The result is a satisfying melding of creative personalities but it wouldn't work on an Erykah Badu album-- it's too vaporous, too unconcerned with personality. The same goes for Thom Yorke's contribution on "Electric Candyman"; Ellison turns him into a ghost, which makes perfect sense. Following the shattering Cosmogramma, Until the Quiet Comes is disarming at first. It sometimes feels like an experiment in how much can be stripped away while still sounding like Flying Lotus, but the reduction offers a new perspective into what Ellison is about. Los Angeles and Cosmogramma brought to mind the L.A. that thrives on acceleration. The energy here is just as strong, but it's concentrated into a smaller space. So while this might be Flying Lotus' most accessible record, it's less about being pleasant and more about deep focus. Each of these 18 tracks tends to introduce one or two emotional or musical elements and meditate on them for a brief time before easing back into silence. Quiet is a series of suggestions or clues and it always feels just out of reach, but that leaves a lot of room for the listener. The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means.

2012-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-10-01T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Warp

October 1, 2012

036886c3-30c1-4524-8f1d-4c9bce096788

Mark Richardson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/

Driven by dance-inspired beats and ghostly sampled voices, the new Four Tet album is the most focused in Kieran Hebden's catalog, and also among his best.

Driven by dance-inspired beats and ghostly sampled voices, the new Four Tet album is the most focused in Kieran Hebden's catalog, and also among his best.

Four Tet: There Is Love in You

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13861-there-is-love-in-you/

There Is Love in You

Kieran Hebden first came on the scene in the 1990s as a member of Fridge, a post-rock outfit that to me always looked better on paper than they sounded on record. Whatever you think of his first band, Hebden's subsequent career can be seen as the idea of post-rock done right. His appetite for music, on the evidence presented in his albums, singles, DJ sets, and collaborations, is voracious. But Hebden has a way of transforming and integrating influences rather than channeling them. So if his loose improvised collaborations with drummer Steve Reid captured something of the spirit of the classic late-60s free jazz records on Impulse!, they also managed to carve out a unique and identifiable aesthetic that sounds very much like today. When working with others, like the wooly free-folk unit Sunburned Hand of the Man or the dubstep producer Burial, Hebden knows when to lead and when to get out of the way. But all the while, whatever the context, he's absorbing. And when it comes to his own records as Four Tet, he has a knack for combining sounds from all over and making them his own. Rounds is the one undisputed Four Tet classic, but all are at least good. It's not unusual for Four Tet records to have a few dull patches, but given Hebden's M.O., that's never a big problem. You expect him to explore a bit, so it's okay when once in a while something doesn't quite gel. Ringer, an intriguing EP from 2008 that throbbed with a minimal pulse and revealed a surprisingly austere side to his music, is a good example. It was the kind of record you wanted to inch closer to, because you had the sense there might be more going on beneath the surface than you'd initially realized. The follow-up album, There Is Love in You, is the glorious sound of those ideas being drawn into the light. This is the most focused Four Tet album by a huge margin, and for some listeners that could be an issue. Hebden apparently refined this music over the course of a long stint as a resident DJ at the London club Plastic People. He'd play developing tracks in his sets, see how people responded, and return to them armed with this information. And while the result isn't dance music proper, There Is Love in You definitely functions on that plane. This isn't fist-pumping music that toys with the pleasure of pop music, like one of my favorite Four Tet tunes, "Smile Around the Face". And it's not an album that bowls you over with the density and intricacy of its textures. Instead, it's both heady and physical, subtle but powerful music for thinking and moving or ideally doing both at the same time: It's been a while since a brisk walk through the city sounded this good. Very early in the 2000s, the corny word "folktronica" was sometimes applied to Four Tet's style. It never defined him, but the tag was applied because it described his fondness for samples of sounds that seem to be reverberating in a physical space. He sampled jazz cymbals, guitars, gamelan-style percussion, and voices, mixing them in with electronic squiggles and choppy breaks culled from hip-hop. Hebden's fondness for acoustic sounds caused his music to come over as unusually airy and bright. It made you think of daylight rather than the nocturnal crackle of sampled vinyl. Though Love is a very different album from those earlier records, remnants of the sound palette remain, imparting a similar sense of clarity, brightness, and warmth despite its late-night club-bound inspiration. The album begins with a crisp cymbal tap on "Angel Echoes" that sounds perfectly live until a quick digital stutter comes a few bars in, and then a clipped female voice, reduced to just syllables but still conveying a strong sense of yearning, begins looping into view. There are bells, a steady midtempo 4/4 kick, and that voice, and that's about it. But "Angel Echoes", like most of the record that follows, is strangely moving in spite of its limited toolkit. After it ends abruptly and tumbles into the brilliant "Love Cry", a much more drawn-out and darkly shaded tune, it starts to become clear that another inspiration could be in play: the music produced by Hebden's schoolmate, Will Bevan aka Burial. The pair collaborated on an intriguing two-track 12" last year, and if nothing else, Hebden's consistent return here to the texture and expressive possibilities of vocal fragments forms a clear link. "Sing", halfway through the record, is the most affecting and flat-out gorgeous example of the technique, as it laces the propulsive housey rhythmic thrust-- the push and pull of the kick and snare, bits of percussion, a short and repetitive synth motif-- with an alien, genderless voice that curls into a kind of weary howl. The effect reminds me of nothing so much as the "ah-AH-ah" vocals that snake through Aphex Twin's immortal "Windowlicker", and Hebden's processing gives "Sing" a similar sense of simultaneous grounding and weird dislocation. Hebden has studied Aphex Twin carefully, having made his first splash in 1999 when he remixed a track from SAW II for one of Warp's 10th Anniversary compilations. Elsewhere on Love, you can find the creative melding of beats and classical minimalism that producers like Richard James and Nobukazu Takemura were exploring in the 90s. An array of metallic percussion pops up, organized into hypnotic grid-like patterns that gradually build and change over the track's duration. The voice sample in "Circling" doesn't appear until two-thirds of the way through the track's runtime, and it brings with it a cluster of bright electronic tones that call to mind the iconic pulse of Reich/Riley minimalism. The loping, sleepy "This Unfolds" has several layers of quietly twinkling sound happening at once, and you can shift your perception to follow along with any one of them or simply let the whole thing wash over you. Though it mostly lays back and doesn't waste any notes, There Is Love in You always has just enough going on to pull you back in any time you feel like relegating it to the background. It works best taken whole, rather than broken into individual tracks. Whenever There Is Love in You comes to the closing "She Just Likes to Fight", a quietly pretty instrumental built around a straightforward guitar melody, I start thinking of Hebden's early days. There's a moment at the 2:18 mark where the music pauses for a moment as a tapped guitar harmonic rings out, and it brings me back for a split-second to "Harmonics", the acoustic guitar instrumental that is the one Fridge tune I love without reservation. It's such a basic and elemental thing, the overtones of one metal guitar string vibrating in place, but in the right hands it becomes a tool that can be used to deliver a surprising blast of feeling. The simple power of sound is something this guy has understood from the beginning.

2010-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

2010-01-25T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Domino

January 25, 2010

036aaf08-3fde-4ad3-ab54-200549853cc7

Mark Richardson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/

The one-time EDM superstar’s production has never sounded shinier or sugarier, but beneath the maximalist synths and peppy rhythms lurk more complicated, bittersweet feelings.

The one-time EDM superstar’s production has never sounded shinier or sugarier, but beneath the maximalist synths and peppy rhythms lurk more complicated, bittersweet feelings.

Porter Robinson: SMILE! :D

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/porter-robinson-smile/

SMILE! :D

Porter Robinson thought he was ready to have fun. After the probing vulnerability of his 2021 album Nurture—wrung out after years spent trying to complicate the candy-painted sheen of his experiments with EDM—the North Carolina-raised musician set out to reconnect with the pleasure-seeking that informed his earliest work. His new album SMILE! :D is garishly nostalgic and unrepentantly joyous, full of maximalist synth leads that glimmer like a Blingee gif and tender-hearted vocal melodies that vibrate with the youthful abandon of songs overheard in suburban skate shops. On one level, it’s a cathartic release, a relieved exhale after a creative block that led to his last album. With a guest spot from the alt-pop pranksters in Frost Children and a torrent of silly stunts to promote the album’s singles, he signaled his goofy intentions. (At a pop-up event for “Kitsune Maison Freestyle,” he vibe-checked each fan that showed up and gave away clothing from his own closet.) But what’s actually in the songs is more complicated and emotionally raw than his reckless abandon implies. For the first time, Robinson reveals more of his sense of humor—“Bitch, I’m Taylor Swift,” he deadpans in “Knock Yourself Out XD”—but underneath the vivid colors and silly jokes, he’s wrestling with heavier themes. “Cheerleader,” though built around a synth lead as sickeningly sweet as the dust at the end of a roll of Smarties, grapples with the dynamics of parasocial relationships between fans and artists. Appreciative but anxious, lighthearted yet lacerating, the track’s tone is a tightrope walk made all the more dizzying by the confectionary rush of its instrumentation, which recalls both the impossibly glossy emo pop of late-aughts Warped Tour staples like Metro Station and the post-hyperpop experiments of singer-songwriters like glaive and aldn. Throughout, Robinson reflects on getting older and becoming an almost-pop star and ever more public figure. Even when he wraps his thoughts in colorful, caffeinated trappings, they hit hard. On “Year of the Cup,” he sings of a desperate, self-lacerating urge to be liked: “I can’t go to sleep/’Cause my mind keeps ringing with times that I laid out everything wrong with me up on stage/It’s embarrassing.” “Easier to Love You” mulls the loneliness of aging, finding disappointment in the distance between the person you are and the person you thought you might become. All the while, he favors arrangements as bright as he’s ever programmed: Tempos remain high, and chiming guitars float skyward in the mix. The energy is never more striking than on “Russian Roulette,” a peppily bittersweet song that grapples with career exhaustion and suicidal ideation—and takes a tongue-in-cheek swipe at an infamous joke review from Pitchfork’s early years—before ending with one of the most cutting moments on the whole album. After an emo-fueled chorus—“I wanna live/I don’t wanna die”—leads to a bouncy trance outro, a primitive computer-generated voice lectures about dance-music cliches (“The kick drum and bass suggests the song is coming to a close—that’s the format we’re used to”) before scolding, “Don’t kill yourself, you idiot.” Amid such stark contrasts in tone, the sudden vulnerability is strangely affecting. The split between effervescent sound and downcast mood is jarring. Robinson has been smiling through the pain at least since the loopy yet apocalyptic “Sad Machine,” but something feels different on SMILE! :D, as though he were under less pressure to make sense of the grand, sweeping emotions. He’s willing to be chaotic and a little all over the place, and though that does occasionally result in moments that are hard to process, Robinson proves that he’s as adept at wringing moving moments out of pop tropes as he is conjuring alien worlds.

2024-07-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

2024-07-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Mom+Pop

July 26, 2024

036e1d3d-06bb-4935-8e0b-28d0fc8993db

Colin Joyce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/colin-joyce/

Björk's eighth full-length release may be her most ambitious yet. The nature-themed Biophilia is supported with iPad apps, a series of live shows, and a forthcoming documentary, but sometimes the cross-platform zeal outstrips the songwriting. * *

Björk's eighth full-length release may be her most ambitious yet. The nature-themed Biophilia is supported with iPad apps, a series of live shows, and a forthcoming documentary, but sometimes the cross-platform zeal outstrips the songwriting. * *

Björk: Biophilia

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15915-biophilia/

Biophilia

The most common caricatures of Björk tend to fixate on her outsized aesthetic sense. But for all the bonkers fashion choices, outré collaborators, and leftfield influences she pulls into her orbit, it's easy to forget that her worldview is also equally informed by a sympathy and awareness of the systems that guide us. From the "beats and strings" manifesto that shaped Homogenic to the "music for laptop speakers" mandate that drove Vespertine through to the vocals-only absolutism of Medúlla, her obsession with patterns and structure and conceptual boundaries has consistently been at the center of her work. Often, she has celebrated the messiness and the chaos implicit in these very things; in fact, the very first line of her very first single took a perverse delight in the lack of logic inherent in one of the biggest and most complex systems of all: human behavior. Biophilia marks Björk's eighth full-length release, and represents her definitive attempt to create an ecosystem around her work. Billed as her "most ambitious and interdisciplinary project yet" and boasting all the usual fixings of a Björk release (dazzling artwork, a Michel Gondry video, vanguard instrumentation, a bizarre list of collaborators), it also comes supported by a corresponding iPad application for each of its 10 tracks, a new website, a series of live shows and "music workshops", and a forthcoming 90-minute film documenting its creation. Beyond that, the album itself purports to engage with some pretty momentous themes, with song titles like "Thunderbolt", "Dark Matter", and "Cosmogony" and imagery focusing on time, space, and the natural world. (Note that editor Brandon Stosuy wrote press materials for this release prior to being hired by Pitchfork.) The stakes feel even higher in light of Björk's mottled output over the past decade. Between 2004's well-received but thin-sounding Medúlla and 2007's unfocused and sprawling Volta, Björk has arguably been unable to produce anything definitive since 2001's Vespertine. In its worst moments, Volta painted a picture of an artist whose quality control instincts had been eroded by indulgence. One would be forgiven if news of all the scaffolding around Biophilia sounded up alarm bells: Is this her coming back strong, or piling conceptual materials on top of her music in an effort to give it extra depth? If the songs themselves are any indication, the answer leans more toward the latter. While the promotional and conceptual packaging around Biophilia are as forward-thinking as ever, the sheer quality of Björk's songwriting remains problematic. It feels, once again, as if she's prioritized the superficial aspects of Biophilia's presentation over, well, the music. I can't imagine, for example, how a middle section as dull as "Dark Matter" and "Hollow" made the cut. Even slightly more realized compositions like the the music box plink of "Virus" and the twitching "Thunderbolt" are essentially just simple motifs stretched way beyond their limits. Too often, she combats the lack of any real structure or melody by over-singing, or lapsing into one of her familiar and increasingly lazy-sounding house vocal runs.  It too often feels as if Björk's songwriting process is now to sing arbitrarily over top of her collaborators' instrumental tracks rather than structure the music around a melody. Sure, there are highlights. When she does get a tune to sing, she attacks it with almost apologetic gusto. Lead single "Crystalline" features one of the album's best hooks, and as a result, one of Björk's best and most focused performances. Elsewhere, the gorgeous "Cosmogony" carries a faint hymnal quality and an immediacy that wouldn't sound totally out of place on Vespertine or even Homogenic. With its satisfyingly filthy electro skronk, the uptempo "Mutual Core" may be the album's best track overall. Although a big part of the PR story around Biophilia, the apps ultimately feel less than essential to the overall experience. Even after spending significant amounts of time with them, it's easy to separate them mentally from the music. They're well-designed and infused with appropriate amounts of playfulness and mystery, and a few have almost meditative properties that suit the music well, but ultimately they feel like they're there to support a concept rather than vice versa. Beyond that, in costing $1.99 apiece (or just under $10 for the full complement), the app gambit ultimately hits upon another latter-day Björk tendency, which is her seeming willingness to exploit all available revenue streams. Is it fair to fault Biophilia for failing to realize its own ambition? That's a tough question; Björk's curatorial acumen, her visual sense, and her vision are so beyond reproach that it feels almost churlish to complain about something as simple as a lack of melody, or the fact that she's an experimental music pioneer who might just be over-charging for her experimental iPad apps. Nonetheless, for an album ostensibly about the elements, there are some essential pieces missing here. As an innovator, she's as vibrant as ever, but as a songwriter, she sounds tired.

2011-10-13T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-10-13T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic / Pop/R&B

Nonesuch

October 13, 2011

036e9c90-6d97-43b8-abd3-f5516dcb4a07

Mark Pytlik

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/

An indie folk record with tinges of country rock, the songwriter’s latest album pays tribute to his Kansas City home with a vision of the Midwest that feels mythical and enormous.

An indie folk record with tinges of country rock, the songwriter’s latest album pays tribute to his Kansas City home with a vision of the Midwest that feels mythical and enormous.

Kevin Morby: Sundowner

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kevin-morby-sundowner/

Sundowner

Kevin Morby writes love songs about places. On Singing Saw, it was California. On Harlem River and City Music, it was New York City. On his latest record, Sundowner, it’s Kansas, with its endless stretches of highway and shocking pink sunsets. Morby grew up in Kansas City, and recently returned there after a multi-year stint on the West Coast. Sundowner is his homecoming, an indie folk record with tinges of country rock that feels like looking at an old postcard. At times, it’s so dedicated to late-’60s pastiche that it becomes too precious, like little more than a study of influences. Mostly, though, it is a perfect afternoon under a big blue sky, a vision of the Midwest that feels mythical and enormous. Sundowner corrects the course after 2019’s Oh My God, which seesawed from huge, pinwheeling Sticky Fingers arrangements to half-baked Transformer karaoke. Morby sounded lost, unsure of what kind of music he wanted to make. Sundowner is sharper, more in sync with his previous records. It’s certainly referential, but it’s hardly completely retro. On opener “Valley,” an estuary of Mellotron pours into a crystal sea of guitar. Morby sings of the stars above him, and the valley beneath. His voice sounds weary and reedy as ever, and then it cuts out, allowing a guitar to split the night sky in two. “Campfire,” with hushed vocals from Katie Crutchfield and field recordings from an actual campfire, feels like a constellation of three songs wrapped up in one. The Mellotron takes the lead for the ending, the album’s prettiest, quivering as the song shifts into a waltz that feels like crossing dewy grass with a blanket draped over your shoulders. The more uneven moments threaten to undermine Morby’s strongest songs. “Brother, Sister” belongs in a tacky old Western movie, with drums that boom like thunderclaps and a goofy yelp at the end. Much of the song involves Morby singing “bum buh duh bum,” or, “Oh brother/They killed you dead,” like a small-town sheriff with a handlebar mustache. While his penchant for all things retro is usually compelling, here it’s so painstakingly recreated that it’s a little ridiculous. “Velvet Highway,” a fully instrumental track, runs into a similar problem. It starts off with languid, dreamy keys, then disintegrates into weird percussion and what sounds like someone jabbing the highest notes on an old piano. This is where Morby runs into trouble: by leaning too heavily on tropes from the past, he misses the opportunity to bricolage with the present. He’s at his best when he writes the character studies that have become almost a signature of his career. Often they are called by their first names: On Sundowner, we meet Jamie, who died when he was 25; Desi, who became a mermaid; and Jessi, the one with the beautiful voice. Morby loves them all; you can see them flash in front of your eyes like old Super 8 footage. The record’s most vivid and potent moment comes on the melodramatic, seven-minute-long “A Night at the Little Los Angeles.” Morby imagines a girl smoking cigarettes on Mulholland, beaches of sugar, the soft sound of people having sex in the next room. He notices things that are hard to catch: a tightness in his chest; background conversations with a hotel clerk; the infinite stretch of Kansas. His observations require perception—perhaps Morby’s greatest skill as a musician. Plenty of what he sees is mundane, but it’s Morby’s gift that the quotidian never feels boring. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2020-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-10-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Dead Oceans

October 19, 2020

036f6c85-75bc-49fd-a8b1-88ccd170434c

Sophie Kemp

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sophie-kemp/

The singer and multi-instrumentalist joins jazz musician Francesco Turrisi for a thoughtful and ambitious album that spans opera, Appalachian bluegrass, gospel, and traditional Italian music.

The singer and multi-instrumentalist joins jazz musician Francesco Turrisi for a thoughtful and ambitious album that spans opera, Appalachian bluegrass, gospel, and traditional Italian music.

Rhiannon Giddens: there is no Other

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rhiannon-giddens-there-is-no-other/

there is no Other

there is no Other, the sparse collaborative album by Rhiannon Giddens and Francesco Turrisi, doesn’t shine a light on old music; it blocks out the sun entirely, scavenging the darkness for deeper understanding. Giddens is a MacArthur Fellow, a conservatory-trained opera singer, and a multi-instrumentalist with a knack for finding uncanny harmony among distant generations and geographies of music. Turrisi is a jazz composer with concentrations on early baroque and Mediterranean music. On this wide-ranging collection of covers and original material by Giddens, they speak to each others’ strengths, refining century-spanning stories into a broken prayer for unity. The music asks for close listening and contemplation; the space they create is small, with room for all of us. Giddens’ body of work—including three solo albums, a ballet score, and collaborative projects like Carolina Chocolate Drops and Our Native Daughters—is united by a desire to use everything around her to its fullest communicative potential. As a result, listening to her records can feel like exploring a well-curated home, where every object weighs heavy with meaning. Take, for instance, her banjo. A familiar tool within her favored arenas (folk, bluegrass, old-time music), it serves Giddens as a symbol within a symbol: a custom-made recreation of the 19th-century African American instrument adopted by white musicians and popularized through minstrel shows. She plays it as a reclamation, a way to ensure her music’s history remains inextricable from its delivery. “You’re gonna have things that I never had,” she sings in a gripping rendition of civil rights activist Oscar Brown, Jr.’s “Brown Baby.” “Sweetie, you’re gonna live in a better world.” Churning along to the rhythm of Turrisi’s Arabic frame drum, the banjo is a source of droning dissonance and lilting refrains of hope. Like the best folk music, there is no Other was documented quickly, in just five days, and it consists mostly of first takes. The song selection is thoughtful and ambitious, spanning opera, Appalachian bluegrass, gospel, and traditional Italian music. Pristine and almost confrontationally quiet, the production focuses on the duo’s interplay, as they bore into their songs with earthy severity; on the most elaborate arrangements, they are joined by a cellist. Approaching textures that feel almost gothic, it continues Giddens’ path from her T Bone Burnett-produced debut, 2015’s Tomorrow Is My Turn: a continual refinement of focus that allows her songs to speak for themselves. With such sparse arrangements, the album’s grandest moments come from Giddens’ vocals. She delivers her originals with the same spirit as more familiar material, like a show-stopping take on “Wayfaring Stranger.” A gospel standard that’s endured hundreds of years (not to mention covers by everyone from Johnny Cash to Ed Sheeran), it’s Giddens’ favorite kind of artifact: wounded but immortal, of unknown origin but with deep roots. She sings the words as though the journey could lead her somewhere pivotal and new, a search for common ground through history’s most haunted corners. Few artists are so fearless and so ravenous in their exploration.

2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-05-08T01:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Nonesuch

May 8, 2019

0370a076-0fc0-4a8c-824a-9322cdf5e329

Sam Sodomsky

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sam-sodomsky/

Borrowing the clean hooks of metalcore and scene-chewing flourishes of MySpace emo, the San Diego band’s second album takes an unflinchingly honest look at impending doom.

Borrowing the clean hooks of metalcore and scene-chewing flourishes of MySpace emo, the San Diego band’s second album takes an unflinchingly honest look at impending doom.

SeeYouSpaceCowboy: The Romance of Affliction

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/seeyouspacecowboy-the-romance-of-affliction/

The Romance of Affliction

Note: This review discusses addiction and self-harm. Connie Sgarbossa spent the past two years wrestling with addiction, depression, OCD, bipolar disorder, and the question of whether making SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s second proper album would offer any kind of relief. Two weeks after the band finished recording The Romance of Affliction, Sgarbossa’s girlfriend found her unconscious on the couch, the result of a Xanax overdose meant to end her life. By recent accounts, things have improved—SeeYouSpaceCowboy are back on the road and Sgarbossa has given herself grace as she pursues recovery. What hasn’t changed is her conviction in the unflinching and often unflattering honesty of The Romance of Affliction: SeeYouSpaceCowboy are living proof that cathartic self-expression shouldn’t be expected to perform miracle cures. Sgarbossa’s lyrical fatalism complicates and enriches an album that would otherwise be considered a full triumph. Imagine Converge guzzling Sparks Ultra and steel shavings, and that’s 2019’s deviously catchy The Correlation Between Entrance and Exit Wounds, which announced SYSC as heirs apparent to sasscore 2.0: After all, this mutant form of dance-punk was created in their homebase of San Diego, as the city’s white-belt screamo and “Spock Rock” post-hardcore scenes commingled with far-left politics, highbrow literary pretense, and gratuitous handclaps. The Correlation had a lot going for it, and The Romance of Affliction does these things more so: The vocals skew harder towards both deathcore and Warped Tour, the production is sharper, and the songs are longer and more unconventionally structured, expanding to accommodate upstart noise rappers and metalcore icons. The guest list is impressive, and the mere appearance of members of Every Time I Die and Underoath signifies The Romance of Affliction’s status. But both Keith Buckley and Aaron Gillespie accommodate themselves to SeeYouSpaceCowboy, not vice versa—each a recognizable voice, yet one among many in Sgarbossa’s frenetic racket. The closing title track expands on SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s fruitful collaboration with heavily face-tattooed Epitaph act If I Die First, while the Shaolin G feature “Sharpen What You Can” proves that panic chords and double-kick drums are fundamentals for a new generation of emo rappers. If the individual influences are familiar, their coherence within a singular sound is modern—and like most exciting music in the vanguard of populist and extreme metal, SeeYouSpaceCowboy’s accessibility and ambition are inversely proportional to their desire to appear “tasteful.” Opener “Life as a Soap Opera Plot, 26 Years Running” shifts gears about five times before the band lets out an a cappella “woo!” “Misinterpreting Constellations” grinds to a halt for a handclap breakdown. This isn’t a fun record by any means, but SeeYouSpaceCowboy are freakishly adept at using the most immediately gratifying parts of oft-maligned influences, drawing on metalcore’s clean, septum-piercing hooks and the scene-chewing flourishes of MySpace emo. On past releases, melodies felt like brief interruptions from Sgarbossa’s guttural howls; here, “Misinterpreting Constellations” and “Melodrama Between Two Entirely Bored Individuals” evoke a more believably vampiric AFI or the Blood Brothers retconning themselves as a festival act. The Romance of Affliction isn’t a crossover album—playing it in a social setting would still be taken as an act of antagonism by people who’ve never listened to metalcore. Even putting aside the confrontational production values, SeeYouSpaceCowboy demand a reconsideration of the reflexive tendency to stereotype this type of music as an expression of overblown, adolescent suburban pain. It’s not that they lack a sense of humor—this is a band with a song called “Stop Calling Us Screamo.” But there’s also the self-awareness that often accompanies a prolonged struggle with mental illness. Sgarbossa never glamorizes nor sanitizes her pain, even when it’s rendered with theatrical flair. “It’s not enough to stay warm/I want to burn in the flames” captures the impulsivity and nihilism of active addiction, where no emotion can ever be considered overdramatized. SeeYouSpaceCowboy initially imagined The Romance of Affliction as an uplifting sequel to The Correlation Between Entrance and Exit Wounds until life intervened; the album owes its success to their inability to fake a happy ending. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

2021-12-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

Metal

Pure Noise

December 6, 2021

0370ba5e-4557-44af-a8e1-ae5227671bbc

Ian Cohen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/

Ten years in 10 discs: this-- surely definitive-- edition of the New Order story starts with a shattered band groping to replace the irreplaceable and ends with a group surfing to no. 1 on the UK charts. In between is some of the most casually amazing pop music ever made, but these two bookends-- "Dreams Never End" and "World in Motion"-- tell you more about the group than you'd think. The interesting thing about "Dreams Never End" is that Peter Hook sings on it, and he does as well as Barney Sumner would have. Following the

New Order: Movement / Power, Corruption and Lies / Low-Life / Brotherhood / Technique [Collector's Editions]

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12418-movement-power-corruption-and-lies-low-life-brotherhood-technique-deluxe-editions/

Movement / Power, Corruption and Lies / Low-Life / Brotherhood / Technique [Collector's Editions]

Ten years in 10 discs: this-- surely definitive-- edition of the New Order story starts with a shattered band groping to replace the irreplaceable and ends with a group surfing to no. 1 on the UK charts. In between is some of the most casually amazing pop music ever made, but these two bookends-- "Dreams Never End" and "World in Motion"-- tell you more about the group than you'd think. The interesting thing about "Dreams Never End" is that Peter Hook sings on it, and he does as well as Barney Sumner would have. Following the suicide of Ian Curtis and subsequent retirement of the Joy Division moniker, New Order began as a band without a frontman; the trick of them is that they stayed that way, even after Sumner had become the regular vocalist. Sumner's often flat, affectless voice might be a familiar point of contact with New Order but it's rarely their focus. Their notoriously careless lyrics-- Sumner has generally made great play of how last-minute they are-- are a further sign of the group's discomfort with the way rock music tends to be lensed through its singer. So it's no surprise the 12" format was so attractive for New Order-- more lovely space for the vocals to wander out of entirely. So if Sumner isn't a frontman, what is he? "World in Motion" suggests an answer. It's a song that uses soccer as a metaphor for raving and resistance-- "Beat the man! Take him on!"-- so why not use the sport as a metaphor for what the band who made it do? In those terms, Sumner isn't a frontman, he's a target man: The striker whose job isn't just to score, it's to hold the ball so his teammates can move forward and into play. New Order's secret is their fluidity, their easy sharing of the spotlight. At any time in any song, any one of them might provide the hook-- the bright drama of Gillian Gilbert's keyboards, the giddy sequencing of Stephen Morris' percussion, Peter Hook's famously liquid basslines, or indeed Sumner's own guitar lines, as gorgeously full and melodic as his vocals are blank. This interplay defined New Order from the beginning-- on Movement's centerpiece "The Him", your focus flickers from the tribal drumwork to the blocky thrash of Sumner's guitar to the stern jab of the bass: it's almost never on the words. But New Order really woke up to their own potential when they bought a nightclub and started making music that might fill it, and for this side of the story you need the second discs of these generous releases, filled with singles and 12" remixes. The deluxe reissue package can feel like the industry's last throw of the back catalogue dice-- hoover up all sorts of bits and bobs and use historical context as a figleaf to persuade people to buy the same record a third or fourth time. But not this time. If New Order had never released singles, how would we remember them now? Perhaps authors of a solid body of pop work, dependable fixtures of the alternative scene whose success nobody could begrudge. These albums are often excellent, but of these five packages, the "bonus disc" beats the first at least three times. The rhythmic experiments on Movement, for instance, make more sense when you hear them alongside the mechanoid funk of "Everything's Gone Green" and the sudden break into joy of "Temptation". The second disc here takes the bleak pressure off the original album, letting it breathe not as an awkward afterthought to Joy Division but as a group pushing that band's musical ideas further. Their most coherent and underappreciated record, it's still an uncomfortable listen, with tracks like "Senses" savage in a way they never were again. Power, Corruption and Lies exists in the shadow of two remarkable singles: "Temptation" and "Blue Monday". The first had established the band's emotional signature: a bittersweet rush of hard-won, inarticulate bliss. Many of their most glorious tracks-- "Bizarre Love Triangle", "Run", "Your Silent Face", "Thieves Like Us"-- feel like returns to the well "Temptation" dug, which makes it even more perverse that the 1987 re-recording of that track is an absentee here: The original's greatness is rougher-edged. "Blue Monday", meanwhile, took the icy landscape of Movement-- and hence its loyalist audience-- fully onto the dancefloor. Power, Corruption and Lies works to reconcile these seminal records: It's a spiky take on synth-pop, with some of the group's giddiest music. The uninhibited tumbles of "Age of Consent" and "The Village" suggested a band drunk on possibility; "Your Silent Face" married rhythm and grandeur and anger. A generally sympathetic re-mastering job can't disguise how clattery and sharp Low-Life sounds: Hailed at the time as New Order's first really great album, it's now the one that seems most time-bound thanks to its brash mid-80s keyboard sounds. There's plenty of drama here, but the album's two stand-out tracks are best heard in their bonus-disc extended versions. At full 18-minute stretch, "Elegia" more than earns its pomposity, while the long mix of "The Perfect Kiss" has some claim to be the decade's greatest 12" edit: A riot of interlocking bass and keyboard hooks, breathless handclap drums, and five or six different climaxes. The bonus disc of Brotherhood has two more peerless 12" mixes-- Shep Pettibone's extensions of "Bizarre Love Triangle" and "True Faith"-- but the album itself is New Order at their most wickedly ramshackle, turning away from the brash electropop of Low-Life and covering most tracks with the messy jangle of Sumner's guitar. They sound, for the first time since Movement, like an indie band-- but a superb one: Four musicians at ease with each other and themselves, combining on tracks like "Way of Life" to provide a feast of hooks that leaves the listener breathless and delighted. Elsewhere, "1963" and "True Faith" suggested they had the songs to be chart fixtures on relatively conventional terms; "Touched By the Hand of God" and the pointless "Blue Monday '88" hinted they might be running out of steam. Instead they made arguably their best record. Past the red herring of "Fine Time"-- a dance music band "going dance," and one of those rare gags that stays entertaining-- Technique takes the easy interplay and full-band sound of Brotherhood and drenches it in good Ibiza vibes. Each track, as it leads you into a fluid maze of melody, is a hug from a stranger you've known all your life. "Nothing in this world can touch the music that I heard as I woke up this morning," sang an awed-sounding Sumner, catching the album's mood perfectly. Technique is magnificent, but it has the weakest bonus disc of all-- listless B-sides and instrumentals, and merely functional remixes. Standard-bearers for club culture in the alternative world for most of the decade, New Order never really adapted to dance music's victory in the UK mainstream: They made more great records, but no more great 12"s. With their sound perfected, they also stopped surprising us: So even though this isn't all the records they made, these collectors' editions still feel like a complete story of this most accidental of bands.

2008-11-10T01:00:01.000-05:00

2008-11-10T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

November 10, 2008

03743b02-c82b-48ad-b189-8b2bc91bf046

Tom Ewing

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-ewing/

Reinventing himseld as a full-on neo-soul singer, Aloe Blacc follows his inspired and often-innovative 2006 LP, Shine Through.

Reinventing himseld as a full-on neo-soul singer, Aloe Blacc follows his inspired and often-innovative 2006 LP, Shine Through.

Aloe Blacc: Good Things

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14695-good-things/

Good Things

Hands up, who remembers the 1970s? OK, now who's gleaned a vague but evocative interpretation of the 70s through its music? Inevitability, the latter group is going to eventually outnumber the former group, and eventually the archivists and revisionists and reinterpreters will be all that's left. And while it'd be nice to think that this group of historical translators is going to do that weird, alternately maligned and lionized pop-music era justice, it's easy to overlook just how received some of that wisdom might be. Yes, Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye were great-- but they were great when there wasn't an established standard for what Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye were yet. Following their lead might take you places, but you don't sweat too much when shadows that tall give you shade every step of the way. Aloe Blacc's recently taken this classic-soul path after years of laboring under an intriguing indie-rap jack-of-all genres approach. And while he clearly studied the vintage R&B greats before creating Good Things, he's content just building a reasonably convincing backlot replica of classic soul rather than putting a new twist on it. Blacc doesn't display the sweet vocal flair of a Raphael Saadiq à la The Way I See It, or the modernized post-hip-hop touch of Ne-Yo in "Back Like That" mode. What he does have is a sort of straightforward emulation of that certain R&B singer-songwriter vibe, a modest, filed-down compromise somewhere between Bill Withers' raw, aching warmth and the smooth, subtle intensity of Donny Hathaway. That voice isn't without his strengths, and lead single-slash-How to Make It in America title theme "I Need a Dollar" is the best exhibit: His voice is strong enough to push back against the spring-step backbeat and turn the chorus into an earworm. If it's the song people know him for from here on out, he could do a lot worse. While Good Things is well-constructed and boasts some inspired touches (the backbone-shivering strings on "Take Me Back" and "Life So Hard"; a slick, skulking reggae groove on "Miss Fortune"), it lacks the foggy, borderline-sinister allure of the best El Michels Affair compositions it strives to match. And with Aloe Blacc's lyrics skewing toward sentiments that straddle the line between "universal" and "so what else is new," Good Things doesn't do much to catch you off guard. He can tug at your heartstrings when the opportunity presents itself; good luck listening to "Momma Hold My Hand" without getting a lump in your throat when he sings, "Momma used to be strong, but she ain't now." But enough of his lyrics lean heavily enough on generations-old songwriting tropes-- pouring his heart out for a woman by telling her that "you make me smile"; lamenting about "families in the street with nothing to eat/ Little baby boys and girls, no shoes on their feet"; calling politicians "hungry wolves dressed like sheep"-- that genuinely human and heartfelt ideas, even sung as warmly as they are, come across through their words like slogans you've long since tuned out. Complicating things is the fact that Aloe Blacc's last album, 2006's Shine Through, was an inspired and often-innovative shot at pushing hip hop-inflected R&B forward; there were a few baffling moments, but he was defiantly ambitious enough to do some pretty out-there things to minimalist disco, Tropicália, and Sam Cooke's "A Change Is Gonna Come". The one time Good Things actually hits on a comparable throw-out-the-blueprint moment, it's with an unlikely cover-- in this case, the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale", re-envisioned as a satin-suited ballad for slow dances. That's a neat bit of unconventional thinking that this album could've used a little more of-- less by-the-book horn charts and worn-out homilies, more era-hopping hybrids and unexpected detours. As it stands, Good Things feels like hopping into a time machine, dialing it to 40 years ago, then forgetting to bring a stack of recent 12" singles with you to completely blow 1970's mind.

2010-09-30T02:00:03.000-04:00

2010-09-30T02:00:03.000-04:00

Rap / Rock

Stones Throw

September 30, 2010

03764c65-a943-4386-9480-ac15e5d170ef

Nate Patrin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/

Beirut's new album was recorded in a piano trio format in just a couple of weeks after Zach Condon scrapped the material he'd been working on for a few years. The resulting nine-song, 29-minute barely-LP, appropriately, sounds like a collection of exposed scaffoldings—a record of a rehabilitative process, more a story of survival rather than a shot at reinvention.

Beirut's new album was recorded in a piano trio format in just a couple of weeks after Zach Condon scrapped the material he'd been working on for a few years. The resulting nine-song, 29-minute barely-LP, appropriately, sounds like a collection of exposed scaffoldings—a record of a rehabilitative process, more a story of survival rather than a shot at reinvention.

Beirut: No No No

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21003-no-no-no/

No No No

In recent interviews, Beirut singer and songwriter Zach Condon has shed some light on the backstory behind the odd, skeletal sound of his band's new album. Condon had been embroiled in personal and creative despair for a few years, some of it the result of working on a new maximalist opus in the vein of his previous work. He abandoned this material to return to low-stakes jamming in a piano trio format; ultimately, No No No's songs developed out of this approach, and the album was recorded in just a couple of weeks. The resulting nine-song, 29-minute barely-LP, appropriately, sounds like a collection of exposed scaffoldings—a record of a rehabilitative process, more a story of survival rather than a shot at reinvention. It would be easy to assume that reinvention was foremost on Condon's mind. After all, his ethnomusicological interests and motley folk orchestras have next to nothing to do with today's musical landscape. Nine years ago, however, these elements seemed to fit in perfectly, distinguishing Condon from the expanding crooner rank-and-file (Jens Lekman, Andrew Bird, Patrick Wolf, Rufus Wainwright) and aligning him with a broader drift toward prewar—or, to use a once-popular keyword, "sepia tone"—nostalgia (see also: the shanties and strophic ballads of the Decemberists, the carny/gypsy fusions of Man Man and Gogol Bordello). But it was doubtless Condon's sense of how to make his compositions sound ornate and simple at the same time—through triumphant, sometimes wordless choruses—that truly gained him his fanbase. His 2006 and 2007 releases were full of mild-mannered anthems that stood on their own—mix-CD-ready cuts like "Postcards from Italy", "Elephant Gun", and "Nantes". Unlike this formative work, there's a sense of absence in the music of No No No; sometimes Condon's commitment to simplicity leads to undeveloped ideas. Condon has honed his innate skill as an arranger of chamber horn and string ensembles over the years: The first half of his 2009 double EP, March of the Zapotec, scored largely for 19-piece Mexican brass band, took his skill to its furthest level of complexity, while the follow up, The Rip Tide, found him making a more serious bid for pop/rock crossover success. For Condon to put his big-bandleader chops to the side—so crucial to all of his previous work—on his first album in four years seems like a tacit acknowledgment that the style of his earlier music is no longer in vogue, as well as a need to find a new, less obsessive process. When Condon does employ horns on the new album, they are effective precisely because they are so sparing: The  writing has a punchier, more functional quality that is worlds away from his former brass chorale leviathans. There are no vestiges of the approach that sometimes made it feel as if Condon had built his entire career in the shadow of Neutral Milk Hotel's "The Fool". These are horn licks in the tradition of '60s and '70s R&B, and all of the later pop music that bent it out of shape. But though this is all new for Beirut, the charm of the well-chiseled, simplistic grooves is modest, and Condon's strong melodic voice is not always there to create a through line. It floats on top of everything like a decorative descant, which can sometimes be taken or left. The two-minute "At Once" pairs an irresolute, maddeningly cyclical four-chord piano progression with a melody that is mostly just one note, and vocals are eschewed entirely on "As Needed" (which sounds like we are hearing only the backing track for a "Surfs Up"-like Smile outtake). It's sometimes easy to wonder what, exactly, Condon was going for when committing so fiercely to such lightly sketched ideas. The answer would seem to be mood, or simply his own pleasure; Condon's own comments articulated how fun the process of making the album was. The greatest joy, however, seems to have occurred when these ideas were germinating, not being formalized and committed to wax. On midtempo flotsam like "Pacheco", or even the slightly awkward title track, the passion seems to have already been wrung out of the song. The best tracks are the most uptempo and groove-locked: moments where Condon's initial excitement seems to have seeped into his melodies. The clearest examples are "Gibraltar" and "Perth", with their syncopated guitar rhythms. No No No may sound ineffectual after a cursory listen, but it reveals some subtle pleasures if you keep it in rotation. Even potentially soporific moments like closer "So Allowed", with its borderline West Side Story-quoting chorus, are ultimately pleasant, and even poignant. But it lacks the melodic heft out of which Beirut briefly built an empire, and doesn't demonstrate Condon searching for something else to fill that void. While it definitely unifies itself around and gains some affective power from sounding unfinished, it still sounds it.

2015-09-09T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-09-09T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

4AD

September 9, 2015

0376a2e4-d032-44fe-be6e-ea109b0a6ca2

Winston Cook-Wilson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/winston-cook-wilson/

The consistently excellent and consistently underrated experimental hip-hop duo's dense compositions layer scores of tiny components into woozy, disorienting symphonies of noise.

The consistently excellent and consistently underrated experimental hip-hop duo's dense compositions layer scores of tiny components into woozy, disorienting symphonies of noise.

Dälek: Abandoned Language

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9968-abandoned-language/

Abandoned Language

Record stores might file albums from this Newark duo in the hip-hop section, and the group might talk a good game about Rakim and EPMD and slather its CD booklets in graffiti graphics, but Dälek aren't really a rap group; it's more accurate to call them an industrial-shoegaze IDM group that sometimes raps. Even way-out exploratory underground rap albums like Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein tend to foreground voices and drums in the mix; in Dälek's music, there's no foreground at all. The voice of MC/producer Dälek (this is one of those confusing groups where the name of the duo is also the name of a dude in the duo) burbles up half-obscured from the thick, heady mix, ghostly in the way it suddenly appears and vanishes while shifting, heaving masses of drums, strings, guitars, and synths scream and flare and buckle around it. And so the actual rapping is only one element in the group's dense compositions, which layer scores of tiny components into woozy, disorienting symphonies of noise. So it's not a huge surprise that most of the group's support comes from the noise and metal undergrounds; they're more likely to tour with Isis or the Melvins than with, say, Aesop Rock. On playlists, they sound better next to Current 93 or Scott Walker than Sean Price or Rich Boy. It's not that rap doesn't have room for maverick explorers like these guys; it's that the group's explorations have led them to actively repudiate nearly all of rap's defining characteristics. They've opted out of the race and into something else. The duo's last album, 2005's Absence, was an hour of ugly, discordant squalls, and it was still somehow the most accessible thing they'd ever made. On Abandoned Language, though, Dälek's impulses tend more toward the contemplative than the assaultive, but they're still as queasy and indistinct as ever. The opening title track is an ambitious, 10-minute sprawl that piles layer upon layer of synth and string on top of an anemic drum-track and a disconsolately muttered vocal. The duo allows Dälek's voice to push closer to the top of the mix than usual, but it remains incomprehensible as often as not. And really, that's fine, since Dälek's lyrics are mostly free-associative backpacker gobbledygook that only occasionally cohere into nice little snatches of language. The point of this stuff, after all, is the seismic drift of the composition; with three minutes left to go, the vocals drop out altogether, and a buzzing swarm of multitracked violins take their place. For a minute, chaos overwhelms the track, but then it coasts back into a pretty but uneasy swamp of warm Rhodes tones and sad, slow drums. The rest of the album follows that opening track's blueprint, pitting glowing warmth against scraping noise and usually letting warmth win. On "Paragraphs Relentless", a constant bass-creak and an insistent sonar blip from guest DJ Rob Swift ooze gorgeously. Near the end of "Content to Play Villain", the synths and drums suddenly vanish and give way to a pretty jazz-horn collage. The scratched-in strings and moaning organs of "Tarnished" imply melody without ever quite letting it take shape. And occasionally seasick noise wins out, as on the beatless, shrieking instrumental "Lynch," but even then the end result is more ambient and organic than it's been on the group's older records. If Dälek didn't have all this discordant float working for them, they'd be one of the most irritating rap groups in history. Their drum tracks never venture beyond simplistic, skeletal thuds. Dälek's delivery is a half-asleep mumble, and his lyrics tend toward joyless Dead Prez agitation and stodgy old-man battle-rap full of complaints about how kids today don't understand what rap really is. But the duo is smart enough not to let that text-heavy frustration overwhelm everything else. Instead, they've drowned it in oceans of sound, and for the first time, that sound has moved toward something approaching beauty. On Abandoned Language, Dälek have done something with rap similar to what their old collaborator Justin Broadrick has been doing with metal in Jesu; they've melted it into an infinity of reverb and revealed an abyss of sadness. It's too easy to say that Dälek make rap for people who hate rap; it's more that they make rap for people who hate everything.

2007-03-08T01:00:02.000-05:00

2007-03-08T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rap

Ipecac

March 8, 2007

03777c86-2370-43b4-8ba8-782f3878d83d

Tom Breihan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/

Indulgent, sprawling, overflowing with ideas and excess, the White Album became not only a monument to unbridled creativity but a rock archetype.

Indulgent, sprawling, overflowing with ideas and excess, the White Album became not only a monument to unbridled creativity but a rock archetype.

The Beatles: The Beatles

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13432-the-beatles/

The Beatles

In his review of the Beatles' 1963 LP debut, Please Please Me, Tom Ewing pointed out that whether or not you consider them to be the best band of the rock'n'roll era, they certainly have the quintessential pop band story. Everything they did is deeply embedded in rock's DNA, and the band's offhand and ad-hoc gestures have long been established parts of pop music mythology. And of the Beatles' albums, none-- not even Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band-- rivals The Beatles as a rock archetype. The phrase, "It's like their White Album"-- applied to records like Prince's Sign o' the Times, Hüsker Dü's Zen Arcade, the Clash's Sandinista!, and Pavement's Wowee Zowee, among many others-- has long been accepted critical shorthand. To use the expression is to conjure a familiar cluster of associations: The work in question is large and sprawling, overflowing with ideas but also with indulgences, and filled with a hugely variable array of material, some of which might sound great one day and silly the next. A band's White Album is also most likely assembled under a time of great stress, often resulting in an artistic peak but one that nonetheless scatters clues to its creator's eventual demise. The Beatles, the band's complex and wide-ranging double album from 1968, is all of these things. It's a glorious and flawed mess, and its failings are as essential to its character as its triumphs. People love this album not because every song is a masterpiece, but because even the throwaways have their place. Even so, for the Beatles, being all over the place was a sign of trouble. The disintegration of the group as one "thing" is reflected in every aspect of the record, from its recording history (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison sometimes worked in separate studios on their own songs) to its production (generally spare and tending to shapeshift from one song to the next) to the arrangements of the songs (which tend to emphasize the solo voice above all). Visual changes were also apparent. Until The Beatles, the group's album artwork tended to depict the band as a unit: same haircuts, same jackets, same costumes, same artist's rendering. But The Beatles was packaged with separate individual color photos of John, Paul, George and Ringo, and they now appear almost forebodingly distinct. All of a sudden, the Beatles neither looked nor sounded like a monolith. So soon after Pepper and the death of manager Brian Epstein in 1967, the writing was on the wall. But the backstory of The Beatles, while fascinating, is inessential to the album's appeal. Yes, they wrote most of it in India on acoustic guitar, while on a pilgrimage of sorts in early 1968 to see the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Some of Lennon's songs, including "Sexy Sadie" and "Dear Prudence", are based directly on the group's disillusioning experiences there. But it's the spectral, floating mood of "Prudence" and Lennon's playful, faintly condescending vocal in "Sadie" that stay with you. And while we know that Lennon's new love, Yoko Ono, was a regular presence during the session, much to the rest of the band's chagrin (McCartney has claimed that she would sometimes sit on his bass amp during a take, and he'd have to ask her to scoot over to adjust the volume), and that her influence on him led to the tape collage "Revolution 9", the more important detail is the final one, that the biggest pop band in the world exposed millions of fans to a really great and certainly frightening piece of avant-garde art. In one sense, "Revolution 9" almost seems like The Beatles in microcosm: audacious, repetitive, silly, and intermittently dull, but also pulsing with life. If the individual Beatles hadn't been on such a songwriting roll during this time or if the album hadn't been sequenced and edited so well, The Beatles could easily have been an overlong slog, a Let It Be x2, say. But somehow, almost in spite of itself, it flows. The iffy jokes ("Rocky Raccoon", "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill", "Piggies") and genre exercises (Lennon's aggro "Yer Blues", McCartney's pre-war pop confection "Honey Pie") are enjoyable, even without knowing that another gem is lurking around the next corner. If The Beatles feels more like a collection of songs by solo artists, they've also each got more going on than we'd realized. John is even more hilarious than we'd imagined, wanting nothing more than to puncture the Beatles' myth ("Glass Onion"), but he's also displaying a disconcerting willingness to deal with painful autobiography in a direct way ("Julia"). Paul's getting disarmingly soft and fluffy ("Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", "I Will"), while simultaneously writing the roughest, rawest tunes in his Beatles oeuvre ("Back in the U.S.S.R.", "Helter Skelter"). George is finding a better way to channel his new Eastern-influenced spiritual concerns into a rock context, while his songwriting toolkit continues to expand ("While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Long Long Long"). And even Ringo Starr writes a decent song, a country & western number with weirdly thick and heavy production ("Don't Pass Me By"). Listening as the tracks scroll by, there's a constant feeling of discovery. But ultimately, the thing about this record is that the Beatles sound human on it. You feel like you're really getting to know them, just as they're starting to get to know themselves. Their amazing run between the latter part of 1965 through 1967 made them seem like a band apart, infallible musical geniuses always looking for another boundary to break. Here, they fail, and pretty often, too. But by allowing for that, they somehow achieve more. White Albums come when you surrender to inspiration: you're feeling so much, so intensely, that you're not sure what it all means, and you know you'll never be able to squeeze it all in. [Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]

2009-09-10T02:00:00.000-04:00

2009-09-10T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

EMI

September 10, 2009

037a1d7f-c848-4ae8-bb5e-2681944542c1

Mark Richardson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-richardson/

Sharing its title with a John Kennedy Toole novel, the Arcade Fire's second album is markedly different from its more cloistered predecessor: On *Neon Bible*, the band looks outward instead of inward, their concerns more worldly than familial, and their sound more malevolent than cathartic. Angry, embittered, and paranoid, but often generously empathetic in their points of view, they target the government, the church, the military, the entertainment industry, and even the basest instincts of the common man. While the group's us-against-the-world stance occasionally comes off as slightly self-righteous or reactionary, their scathingly critical perspective gives weight and direction to their

Arcade Fire: Neon Bible

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9946-neon-bible/

Neon Bible

Sharing its title with a John Kennedy Toole novel, the Arcade Fire's second album is markedly different from its more cloistered predecessor: On Neon Bible, the band looks outward instead of inward, their concerns more worldly than familial, and their sound more malevolent than cathartic. Angry, embittered, and paranoid, but often generously empathetic in their points of view, they target the government, the church, the military, the entertainment industry, and even the basest instincts of the common man. While the group's us-against-the-world stance occasionally comes off as slightly self-righteous or reactionary, their scathingly critical perspective gives weight and direction to their nervy earnestness: If Funeral captured the enormity of personal pain, Neon Bible sounds large enough to take on the whole world. This is evident on the album's incantatory opener, "Black Mirror", whose title derives from a centuries-old device that supposedly foretold future events and allowed viewers supernatural insight the hearts of men. Here, the band holds that mirror up to the world and captures a malevolent reflection. Fitting Neon Bible's more worldly concerns, the Arcade Fire have streamlined the raw, large sound of Funeral into something that achieves the same magnitudinous scale through more economical means. Propelled by inventive guitar work and Jeremy Gara's steady drums, the group pares back anything that might curb the controlled forward thrust of songs like "Black Mirror", "Keep the Car Running", or "The Well and the Lighthouse". These songs don't erupt, but gradually crescendo and intensify. Unlike the cathartic Funeral, Neon Bible operates on spring-loaded tension and measured release. As such, it could strike some listeners as a disappointing follow-up, but the record's mix of newfound discipline and passion will likely imbue it with a long shelf-life. On most songs, the Arcade Fire achieve a headlong forward motion, bolstered by immense church organs and Calexico horns that underscore the angst of Butler's bitter, accusatory lyrics. Perhaps the most noticeable (and promising) development in the band's sound is the more prominent role of Régine Chassagne. If she once sounded studied or mannered, here her angelic soprano projects a tentative hopefulness, making her a capable foil for Win Butler's tense performance. Her contributions to "(Antichrist Television Blues)" and "Black Wave" sound like the vocal equivalent of her soaring string arrangements, co-written with Owen Pallet of Final Fantasy. These changes aren't drastic, but they are significant, especially as they reveal new and interesting touchstones for the band's aesthetic. The influences most commonly associated with Funeral were Davids Byrne and Bowie, but on Neon Bible, it's Bruce Springsteen who appears not only in the wordy songs and aggressive shuffle, but in the compression of so many styles and sounds into one messy, exciting burst. "Ocean of Noise" shuffles furtively on a shoreline samba, due largely to Tim Kingsbury's bassline, while "Bad Vibrations", sung by Chassagne, blends girl-group and new wave performances into a darkly enticing whole. The band never compartmentalizes these styles or consigns them to separate songs, but allows them to blend freely. Although they've expanded their sound, the Arcade Fire's transition into extroversion isn't always smooth or graceful. Neon Bible is full of clunky lyrics, revealing Butler's tendency to overstate and sensationalize. His rhyme schemes are sometimes too deliberate and set-- and no one should be allowed to use the sort of faux-antiquated sentence construction that pops up in lines like "I fell into the water black." "Black Mirror" features one of the record's worst offenders: "Mirror mirror on the wall/ Show me where them bombs will fall." Butler's words, however, have always carried less meaning than the way he sings them and the sound in which his band envelops them, so whenever a line falls flat on Neon Bible, the music, always hurtling forward, picks it up and carries it along. Like many indie artists, the Arcade Fire work best in the album format, and Neon Bible runs on a different-- and in some ways more finely tuned-- mechanical system than its predecessor. It's a shapely work, gracefully building to fall away to build again, as the band sustains a mood that's both ominous and exhilarating. Even "No Cars Go", which originally appeared on their self-titled debut EP, sounds more powerful here than it did in its previous incarnation. As stand-alone tracks, these songs don't make as much sense, which partly explains why those early leaks were so uninspiring. The danger here is inaccessibility: There's only one natural entry point to Neon Bible, and it's "Black Mirror". Everything afterwards flows seamlessly from that song's low rumble and startling imagery-- until the final track. Venturing into the lyrical realm of Trent Reznor, album closer "My Body Is a Cage" seems too eager to wallow in the sort of pained melodrama that fuels the band's detractors. The real disappointment is that Neon Bible doesn't end with "No Cars Go", which easily achieves the release they artfully promise but playfully deny throughout the record's first nine tracks. Not only would it have ended the album on a more generous note, it would have made perfect thematic sense as a final invitation to escape. But despite their conflictedness , the Arcade Fire remain firmly rooted in the here and now. And even as press coverage and fan obsession suggest that the world is making a place for them, the band is still looking for a way to understand that world, and to see it for what it really is-- or at least as it appears in the distorted mirror they hold to it.

2007-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00

2007-03-05T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Merge

March 5, 2007

037abf41-84cd-4b3d-886f-4ad46085c593

Stephen M. Deusner

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/

With his chilly vocals, minimalist beats, and conditions of the heart, the Atlanta singer finds a groove but has little to say about human relations outside of his own self-important quagmire.

With his chilly vocals, minimalist beats, and conditions of the heart, the Atlanta singer finds a groove but has little to say about human relations outside of his own self-important quagmire.

6LACK: East Atlanta Love Letter

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/6lack-east-atlanta-love-letter/

East Atlanta Love Letter

Do you remember the Weeknd? I’m not talking about the neon-painted Starboy seen collecting Grammys from Ariana Grande, jumping on collaborations with Ed Sheeran, whose songs are parodied by Stevie Wonder. I mean the strange figure who emerged in the early sparks of this century with a dazzling set of cold-as-ice mixtapes that desperately depicted post-breakup anxiety, lurid sexual rendezvous, and drug-exacerbated paranoia. This faceless apparition resided in a cracked and debauched world. That Abel Tesfaye parlayed this gnarled form into a legitimate pop star was genuinely shocking. This unlikely success has been a big factor in turning a microgenre like alt-R&B into commercial paydirt, and has allowed an artist like 6LACK—with his chilly vocals, minimalist beats, and conditions of the heart—to ink a deal with Interscope and ride the stainless-steel sounds of songs like “PRBLMS” to double-platinum status. So where does Ricardo Valentine fit in the alt-R&B canon? The first lines of “Unfair,” the opening track from his second album East Atlanta Love Letter, summarize his ethos: “Hope my mistakes don’t make me less of a man/But lately it feel like them shits really can,” he sings in his downbeat, slightly grainy tone. In 6LACK’s mind, hookups on tour are terrible, painful things. Women are saboteurs of his brittle emotions. He treats every speck of feeling that flickers through his wide-open chest cavity as worthy of a song but lacks the lateral thinking, poetic nuance, or sense of irony to pull this off. There’s only so much of his male feelings you can tolerate when, with all sincerity, 6LACK is unleashing lines like, “Fuck me like you’re about to lose your place to the girl next door,” from “Loaded Gun.” The song goes on to compare, not for the last time on East Atlanta Love Letter, his dick to a lethal weapon, as though an inability to control himself inevitably leads to brutal consequences. There’s no humor in this delivery—either you take 6LACK seriously or you don’t take him at all. Endlessly brooding about his own delicate feelings, the Atlanta star has little to say about human relations outside of his own self-important quagmire. So we get songs like “Let Her Go,” where 6LACK paints “groupies” (his word) as untrustworthy and a source of conflict between him and his lover. “Disconnect” depicts the blow-by-blow of a break-up, the singer failing to draw listeners in with simplistic prose like, “I think we had enough/Like, I can’t hear you/I’m falling out of love.” The personal “Nonchalant” could have been his version of Drake’s “Say What’s Real”—an early Drizzy confessional that mixed naked emotion with star-making bragaddocio—but the surly verses only vaguely cover his process, post-fame issues, and haters in ways that cut about as deeply as a wooden spoon. Underpinning 6LACK’s musings are a pristine set of foil-packed beats, all rasping drum machines and ambient synths. By far the most impressive song on East Atlanta Love Letter is the title track. Future is a canonical draft pick for someone trying to make a ATL street record with pop overtones yet this creeping piece of modern soul noir is untypical of Nayvadius’ usual dynamism as he and 6LACK whisper over doomed piano keys and very little else. The simple melody and corny lyrics on closer “Stan,” meanwhile, brings a goofy humility missing from the rest of the project. The purest pop song is “Switch,” the one track that can pass for uptempo and boasts a hook that sticks. A few more fun moments like this would have helped keep the record moving. Yet even “Switch” comes with a bar like, “If I find out you cheating me, just know that/I’ma kill you and that ho, ain't no going back.” It’s like 6LACK can’t help himself. At its best and bleakest, alt-R&B can make you feel like Max Payne, beaten and bloodied, functioning only on a heavy supply of painkillers. The Weeknd won making music like this because he went all in, pulling us into his druggy, self-hating world with scintillating sonics, captivating performance, and words that really popped. 6LACK instead traps listeners within the four walls of his drab hotel room, exposing us to his joyless, low-energy meditations that don’t capture relationships or the human experience in any kind of meaningful way.

2018-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-09-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

LVRN / Interscope

September 21, 2018

037bfbba-b709-4412-af40-d943a6945dec

Dean Van Nguyen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dean-van nguyen/

In 1998, David Berman approached perfection. Absorbed in metaphor, ennui, and isolation, the loping music of American Water didn’t seem like it was trying to be art. It just was.

In 1998, David Berman approached perfection. Absorbed in metaphor, ennui, and isolation, the loping music of American Water didn’t seem like it was trying to be art. It just was.

Silver Jews: American Water

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/silver-jews-american-water/

American Water

I bought Silver Jews’ third album American Water at a now-defunct record store in lower Manhattan called Kim’s. I was 15, maybe 16, and hoped—as I always hoped when I bought something at Kim’s—that the clerks might interpret my selection as a cry for help, or at least a signal that I was up for something cool after their shift. No luck. The first time I played it—that unsteady strumming of electric guitar, David Berman’s country deadpan—I suspect it was in the living room of my dad’s apartment. He raised his eyebrow and wondered aloud if Silver Jews were the worst band he’d ever heard. I pointed out that he owned two albums by the Doors. That my dad didn’t understand this rickety human music only brought me and American Water closer together. Berman had even written a line about this, in a way, on a song called “We Are Real”: “Repair is the dream of the broken thing,” it went. “Like a message broadcast on an overpass, all my favorite singers couldn’t sing.” Here was the implicit promise of indie rock—that you could do something even if the Figurative Dad says you sucked at it—compressed into a one-liner, the insult as a badge of honor, or a casually raised middle finger. The band had started at the end of the 1980s, three college friends making noisy sketches in their Hoboken apartment. (Some of these sketches were recorded direct to the answering machine of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth—a kind of high-culture prank call that telegraphed Berman’s uneasy relationship to the decorum of indie rock.) One of the three friends, Stephen Malkmus, had also recently started a band called Pavement with his childhood friend Scott Kannberg; Silver Jews were—as sadly befits Berman’s fixation on runners-up and marginalia—often footnoted as a Pavement side project. (Silver Jews’ first album, Starlite Walker, came out in 1994, the same year Pavement hit MTV.) It was Berman who came up with the phrase “slanted and enchanted,” which Malkmus borrowed for Pavement’s first album, one of the definitive statements of slackness and grandeur of early-’90s indie rock. Berman, for his part, said he got the idea from Emily Dickinson: “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Berman’s own world was always creakier and foggier than Pavement’s, less edgy, more rustic—not the conscious weirdness of post-punk, but the unconscious weirdness of the American frontier, of religious talk radio, bumper stickers. “In 1984, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.” That’s American Water’s first line. It sounds like the kind of thing you’d overhear at a bar in a dream, the war story of an also-ran. You know, “they had to put me in the hospital—I was just that good.” Of course, he doesn’t attain perfection; nobody in Berman’s world does. You get the sense that 1984 was a long time ago and the man has been counting the days ever since. The album limps along in this sassy, broken way. There’s that line about repair I mentioned before. There are duct-taped shoes and suspenders made of extension cords. There are dragging mufflers and iceboxes filled with grass. Many of the guitar solos seem to sputter out halfway through like a drunk in a foot race, a pantomime of classic rock. Try me, they say, ass-down on the pavement. As with a lot of their peers on the Chicago label Drag City (Royal Trux, Bill Callahan, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), Silver Jews grew out of a moment in underground music when the crimes of the 1970s and ’80s seemed safely enough in the rearview that you could take from that stuff what you wanted. No longer did one have to stand in symbolic opposition to the Rolling Stones—R.E.M. and the Butthole Surfers had done that for you. If one narrative of the 1980s was underground music’s intrusion into a broader commercial space, the narrative of the 1990s was one of commercial music winding its way back into the underground. This is how American Water comes to sound more like “Dead Flowers” than Can, but also why I think my dad couldn’t process it: He figured if you’re going to sound a little like “Dead Flowers,” you might as well really go for it. Berman seemed bent on playing against type, a sensitive man sensitive to the pretensions of sensitive men. His writing stands against urbanity and sophistication, but also against the roots-music fantasies of a home on the range where one can do things like wear denim and “be real.” He was and probably remains a football fan. In one interview, he described a reading he gave at the University of Charleston by saying, “I thought it was an extraordinarily large-breasted student body.” In the same, he described a brief interlude in Louisville by saying, “Sure, my neighborhood bar was a BW-3, but at least I didn’t have to deal with the sullen and homely hippy women that make up such a large portion of that town’s rock scene.” Here was a songwriter absorbed by metaphor and isolation who also told funny stories about hanging out at frat houses, whose country-music preferences elided countercultural tokens like Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash for artists like Charlie Rich, a ’70s singer whose violin-drenched odes to marital love and extramarital affairs could only be construed as roots music by people raised in dentist’s offices. Authenticity, the subtext runs, is a dogma just like any other. With its stylish, funny evocations of style-free concepts like dive bars and tract homes, of “suburban kids with Biblical names,” American Water didn’t seem like it was trying to be art. It just was. Describing the sessions for the album to the Washington Post in 2008, newly sober and with religion, Berman said, “I was taking a lot of drugs at that time. And there were a lot of drugs in the studio. And all these things that would have horrified indie rock people, that I would never want them to know. I wanted to make a record that wasn’t some terrible, big, painful experience. I wanted to make records like other people make records, where you’re having fun when you’re doing it.” What was that contextually painful experience Berman was referring to, you wonder. The band’s second album, The Natural Bridge, had been a trial. Berman, who had recently finished his MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, got so anxious and turned around during the sessions that he eventually had to be hospitalized for sleep deprivation, a state which he likened to being “constantly on the line with God.” Describing the session for the album’s last song, “Pretty Eyes,” drummer Rian Murphy said Berman looked like “a man who was being haunted by ghosts while he was singing.” At one point Berman counseled guitarist Peyton Pinkerton to play like his feet were sopping wet. In the same Post interview, Berman said, “The Natural Bridge is me finding out that random rules and I can’t handle it. It’s too painful that that’s the way life is. And then in American Water I’m trying to re-say it again, to someone else, after having accepted it.” But for all its wit, disaffection and wonder, American Water is also an album of disappointment and angst, of what the writer Thomas Beller, in his appreciation of Berman, called “the bitterness of knowledge.” Like the fiction of Thomas McGuane circa 92 in the Shade or some of Barry Hannah’s darker stuff, these are visions of people with nothing left to lose, New South scenes rippling with Old Testament violence. “My mama named me after a king,” Berman sings on the “Send in the Clouds,” biting off the end of the line. “I’m gonna bury my name in you.” Elsewhere, on “Blue Arrangements,” he and Malkmus describe a father coming home and trashing his son’s room, concluding, “In the end the boy raises himself.” The laziness of the music only cinches the scene’s gothic inevitability: Dad’s going to fuck you up no matter what you do. The climax of the album comes paradoxically early, on a song called “Smith & Jones Forever.” These are the shadowy men with the duct-taped shoes and extension-cable suspenders. Like some arcane hillbilly disco, the song is at once dreamy and dreadful, a crystal ball wherein all one sees is fire. Toward the middle, they quiet, dispersed in a fog. “Got two tickets to a midnight execution,” Berman sings, “hitchhike our way from Odessa to Houston. When they turn on the chair, something’s added to the air/When they turn on the chair, something’s added to the air forever.” Suddenly they alight, fiery and ragged. We are still in the world of glue-sniffers and weekend fishermen, of country-club pools, companion dogs, and fast-food lobbyists, but we are also in the world of ghosts, of good and of evil. Berman seems to see one just behind the other, like transparencies laid on an overhead projector. His and the band's delivery—dry, creaky, but filled with soul—doesn’t try to hide the pain of these songs with polish or sleights of hand. It’s actually impossible to imagine American Water performed with conventional finesse, by a singer who could sing, by a band who could turn on a dime. It would sound too correct, too rehearsed, the insights of entertainers instead of the revelations of ordinary men. Shortly after Berman disbanded Silver Jews in 2009—their final show was in a cave about 300 feet below McMinnville, Tennessee—he offered a public note, part-explanation, part-confession, part-origin story, explaining his relationship to his own father, a powerful, conservative lobbyist named Rick Berman. “He attacks animal lovers, ecologists, civil action attorneys, scientists, dieticians, doctors, teachers,” Berman wrote. “His clients include everyone from the makers of Agent Orange to the Tanning Salon Owners of America.” The note continued, funny, imperiled, self-critical, angry, despairing, the bully and the victim at war in one head. “This winter I decided that the SJs were too small of a force to ever come close to undoing a millionth of all the harm he has caused,” he wrote. Judging from the punch lines alone you would’ve never known he was at war. Berman’s stated epiphany about American Water—“I’m trying to re-say it again, to someone else, after having accepted it”—didn’t quite stick. He got deeper into drugs—Dilaudid, crack, the kinds of things that vault one into strange company. Shortly before going on tour in late 1998—something Berman was famously reticent about doing, and didn’t end up actually doing until 2006—he got into a fistfight in Spain and had his eardrum ruptured. Tour was canceled. In 2001 he put out a very funny, dark, fragile-sounding Silver Jews album called Bright Flight. “The people that I was writing for were for the audience from [American Water],” Berman told the Post. “An indie rock crowd. But my companions were crooks and prostitutes. All manner of sick, sick, despairing, falling apart lives. And I think that there is a major problem in there because I’m not focused, and I reached a point where a lot of my friends that year died, a couple friends. I didn’t have any perspective. For instance, the idea of me being alive right now wasn’t really feasible. It just wasn’t possible to me. At that point I had just lost the plot and I didn’t care.” When Berman attempted suicide in 2003—walking into the Nashville hotel in which Al Gore watched the 2000 election and requesting Gore’s suite on account of wanting to die where American democracy did—I felt, melodramatically but not for the last time, that ending one’s life was the only logical conclusion for someone who saw life the way he did: filled with precious things about which nobody but him seemed to care, not an expression of isolation so much as unbearable connection. Who will tend to this stuff, the moment seemed to ask. Who will nurse the world. I’m projecting, of course, and also probably overestimating the capacity of someone so far gone he had come to believe the vodka was actually cleaning his organs. Still, almost 20 years after the day I descended into Kim’s, I pick through Berman’s writing with Kabbalistic interest, like a backpack out of which I continuously manage to shake lost keys and other useful things. My best friend sometimes cautions me against these conclusions—equating sadness with glory, equating weakness with truth. At the very least, there is the concern of giving undue weight to the insights of someone who later tried to die. I agree it makes only an awful kind of sense. But growing up in America one gets so tired of hearing about winning. Here is the story of a bright morning after you lose.

2017-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-07-30T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Drag City

July 30, 2017

037c4881-aaf0-49f8-a338-45e35e091cbb

Mike Powell

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/

Kanye teams with Ty Dolla $ign for a project that actually sounds finished, but hardly puts anything worth remembering onto it.

Kanye teams with Ty Dolla $ign for a project that actually sounds finished, but hardly puts anything worth remembering onto it.

¥$ / Kanye West / Ty Dolla $ign: VULTURES 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kanye-west-and-ty-dolla-sign-vultures-1/

VULTURES 1

It’s fitting that the Yeezus album cover is a blank CD. It marked the end of an era in which Kanye West’s creative process was governed by the requirements of mass-producing a consumer good. Over the first decade of his career—culminating with that album in 2013—West was frequently divisive for reasons both musical and non-, but enjoyed an unbroken deluge of critical adoration. His grip on the culture began to loosen, however, right around the time paid streaming platforms collapsed the amount of time required to prepare a finished record for release to virtually nothing. Beginning with 2016’s The Life of Pablo, West’s albums have evidently become the products of frantic bursts of writing and recording. Twitter and Instagram document rappers and producers flying to meet West at the 11th hour or emailing songs back and forth; tracklists are adjusted after the files are uploaded to DSPs; things never really cohere. For example, 2021’s sprawling Donda circles a fascinating musical idea (the collision of gospel and digital, as distilled in the moment in “Hurricane” when a choir is cut off as if on a sampler) that would perfectly complement its lyrical concerns. But the album is too rushed and overstuffed to consistently articulate it. VULTURES 1—his collaborative album with Ty Dolla $ign—arrives at the end of a second, far more fraught decade for West. As the long, considered processes that yielded the songs on 2005’s Late Registration and 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy disappeared, he began instead to draw attention for saying things like “slavery was a choice” and then apologizing; for making antisemitic remarks and then apologizing; for cozying up to Donald Trump and then apologizing—and then, on Monday, endorsing Trump for the 2024 presidential election. He has communicated erratically about his struggles with mental health, about his divorce from Kim Kardashian, and about those who have abandoned him and those who have, by God, remained loyal. Each new controversy frequently overshadowed the music he was trying to intermittently promote. In light of all this, VULTURES sounds almost disorientingly complete. The mix is crisp and it bears mentioning that there are no mumbled reference tracks. This is a value-neutral observation—some of the most interesting work from the second half of West’s career is unfinished, or sounds like it—but it gets at one of the most confusing aspects of the last few Kanye West albums: that the apparently unedited vocals of a person closely covered by tabloids have come to sound less distinct, occasionally even anonymous. Recall Ghana/Mali, Dior Homme, “These the Red Octobers.” Frequently, on 2018’s ye and on Donda, West sounded like an actor rehearsing his lines, only hinting at the way he would emote when the camera was turned on. There are no such loose ends here. VULTURES is filled with moments where West breaks into his airy, endearing singing voice—an ideal counterpoint to Ty’s delivery which sounds, as ever, like silk and sandpaper at once. The Donna Summer-sampling “Good (Don’t Die)” is a worthy spiritual sequel to 808s and Heartbreaks’ pleading “Street Lights”; the lilt he adopts on opener “Stars” is at wonderful odds with that song’s martial drums. And when he raps, West is perhaps more technically precise than he has ever been. If you were to strip the timbre from his voice, or place the waveforms of his verses on a 4/4 grid, you might conclude that he’s significantly improved as an MC. But save for the nimble “Burn,” there is a confusing flatness to his verses that exacerbates (or is exacerbated by) the sameness of the writing. The opening bars of his verse on “Do It” (“You don’t like it? That’s your loss/Your opinion don’t change the show cost/Let me know what these hoes cost/I ain’t finna pay the whole cost”) could have been written by any of the dozens of people who presumably shuffled through West’s famously collaborative recording sessions. Where other rappers once provided him with frameworks for songs that would become deeply personal—“Jesus Walks,” after all, was originally a Rhymefest song—many of these are unmistakably off-the-rack. The generous reading of this dynamic would see the songs as genre studies, West trying on different styles without imposing himself on them. But by the time, on “Fuk Sumn,” he raps, “This the real, not a version,” that argument has already been lost. There is not one verse from West on this album that distinguishes itself as the best part of its song. But there are far worse things to be drowned out by. With the exception of the truly terrible “Problematic,” the beats on VULTURES are mesmerizing, rhythmically complex, a little industrial. “Paid,” with its steady pulse, somehow manages to be both cathartic and foreboding; the Playboi Carti- and Rich the Kid-featuring “Carnival” is titanic but wobbles just enough. Even when there is no laundering of influences—the Brazilian funk of “Paperwork” suggests little beyond the vague idea that he should dabble in Brazilian funk—there is enough commitment behind the boards to sell nearly anything. Despite those varied textures and that breathless pacing, the writing on any given song, and certainly on the album when considered as a whole, is shapeless, indistinct, and nearly interchangeable. Put another way: VULTURES is pretty forgettable. The raps about money sound exhausted, and the ones about sex—such a constant focus as to be nearly pathological—ultimately sterile. I am not typing this with a backpack on. I am not. This is a problem not of morality, or even political consciousness, but of style: Yeezus is just as fixated on sex, but treats it as an alien force lurking just beneath domestic life, ready to swallow it whole. On VULTURES it’s rote. It wouldn’t do any good to pick lyrics out of context to make a point about the album’s shallowness; it’s impossible to prove that West’s old notions of sexuality are completely absent. But consider that the moment on “Hoodrat” when he raps, “I hit it from the back/Whore, whore” is not presented with any real anger, contrition, sensuality, or wit. It’s just sort of something he says, in the way that lapses into incredibly obvious samples (“Back That Azz Up,” “Can It Be All So Simple”) scan as stunts without a hint of recontextualization or subversion. There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent. Whatever moments of exuberance or inspiration slip through are drowned out by the din of professionalism. A little over a decade ago—the exact midpoint between The College Dropout and VULTURES—West was wandering through a Rick Owens exhibit in Switzerland when he was moved to play the then-unreleased Yeezus for a crowd of people. Before he triggered the album from his laptop, he recounted to the audience his realization, as a young man, that his primary role as an artist would be that of the interpreter. “I found that when I would drop samples, my friends would react to it more” than to original music, he said. He compared himself to Warhol; he joked about how skeptical, racist gallery crowds might scoff at “a Black guy” invoking “the most obvious artist in the world.” For nearly the entirety of his career, West has twisted raw material from his subconscious and the world outside alike into singular records. VULTURES is a supremely competent album dotted by beats that are truly irresistible; it also feels, for the first time in West’s career, profoundly cynical, as if he’s prodding your brain stem with a surgical instrument, hoping to elicit the basest reaction: How about there?

2024-02-15T00:02:00.000-05:00

2024-02-15T00:02:00.000-05:00

Rap

Yzy

February 15, 2024

037cb71b-b6f5-4b0f-8638-2557a340e3b1

Paul A. Thompson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/

Congolese singer Makara Bianko and French producer Débruit craft polyglot techno-punk with a bustling, metropolitan atmosphere.

Congolese singer Makara Bianko and French producer Débruit craft polyglot techno-punk with a bustling, metropolitan atmosphere.

KOKOKO!: Butu

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/kokoko-butu/

Butu

The first sound on KOKOKO!’s Butu is the sound of bustling traffic. It takes about a minute for the outline of the opening song, “Butu Ezo Ya,” to emerge from the hubbub, as siren synths and shouts that could be mistaken for those of drivers and angry pedestrians reveal themselves as the sound of the band and their instruments. Maybe it’s second nature for a group formed in Kinshasa, the most populous French-speaking city in the world, but this ostensible party music suggests an almost Untrue-like level of metropolitan density. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan said that Usher’s “Yeah!” sounds like it’s playing in a club, no matter where you encounter it. I thought something similar while listening to Butu: This music could turn anyplace into a teeming street corner. KOKOKO! started out as an unconventional quartet making twitchy techno-punk with objects like typewriters and oil barrels—a workaround for the high cost of gear in Kinshasa. Now the duo of Congolese vocalist Makara Bianko and French producer Débruit, the band brings a polyglot perspective to a long lineage of paranoid electronic rock. Both collaborators come from the dance-music universe, yet Bianko’s sweaty shouts and Débruit’s tarnished production impart an unmistakable whiff of punk; fans of electro-punk upstarts Special Interest and Lip Critic will find plenty to love here. “Butu” is a word for “night” in Lingala, one of several languages used by Bianko on the record. Butu’s aesthetic is often associated with clubs and bars, and producer Débruit—a DJ since the late 2000s—flexes his house muscle here, setting Bianko’s voice against irregular snares and overdriven basslines. Sometimes Bianko sounds like a rapper, as when he slips into an impressive triplet flow on “Telema.” Other times he’s a shirtless hardcore shouter, an arch goth crooner, or a relentless human sample. Cloaked in an evocative swath of reverb, Bianko’s competing layers of shouts and ad-libs create the impression of a small posse rather than a single singer. The illusion of continuous chatter and conversation is compelling enough even if you don’t understand any of the languages spoken therein. The band performed in Devo-like hazmat suits early on, and like Devo, KOKOKO! like catchphrases that double as party chants and political statements: “Donne-Moi” (“Give Me”) can refer either to the give and take between a performer and the audience or the exploitation of the Congo’s musical and natural resources by foreign intervenors. “Move the world,” Bianko entreats listeners on “Mokili.” Maybe he’s talking about dancing, maybe political involvement—either way, the tumult of humanity KOKOKO! conjure on Butu sounds capable of shaking the planet off its axis.

2024-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2024-07-23T00:17:10.421-04:00

Experimental

Transgressive

July 23, 2024

037d5e2e-bffb-478e-ad35-5e0cc44f0be2

Daniel Bromfield

https://pitchfork.com/staff/daniel-bromfield/

Playing like a flawlessly sequenced and paced greatest hits album, this live set finds Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo connecting the booms among their three albums while officially cementing one of the year's most rewarding and welcomed comebacks.

Playing like a flawlessly sequenced and paced greatest hits album, this live set finds Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo connecting the booms among their three albums while officially cementing one of the year's most rewarding and welcomed comebacks.

Daft Punk: Alive 2007

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10925-alive-2007/

Alive 2007

The blitzing “Pimp My Pyramid” scheme. The pulsing honeycomb. The tiny metal heads bobbing up and down. The Lite-Brite leather jacket reveal. The dude in front of me who wouldn’t let a pair of crutches stop him from dancing as if the apocalypse were mere minutes away. The sensual explosion that was Daft Punk’s Alive 2007 show is difficult to overstate—or reproduce. Even with the biggest, flattest, sharpest HD setup, there's no way to sufficiently recreate the most exuberant LED-laden music blowout ever staged. So Daft Punk didn’t even try: There will be no Alive 2007 DVD. Commenting on the decision, Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter recently told Pitchfork, “The thousands of clips on the internet are better to us than any DVD that could have been released.” And, in many ways, the Alive tour is a perfect match for YouTube—the ancient Egypt by-way-of “The Jetsons” spectacle barrelling its way through shitty compression quality with blinding force. But still, even the most hectic web clip can’t equal the French duo’s visceral sound-and-vision assault, so the focus of Alive 2007 falls on the reason why Daft Punk were allowed to lug 11 tons of equipment around the world for the last 19 months in the first place: their music. Playing like a flawlessly sequenced and paced greatest hits album, this full-set Paris recording from June finds Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo connecting the booms among their three albums while officially cementing one of the year’s most rewarding and welcomed comebacks. Lest we forget, before the out-of-nowhere debut of the now-iconic 3D triangle in April 2006, it seemed like Daft Punk lost the plot. The monster riffage and mind-numbing gloom of 2005’s Human After All had our favorite party-starters turning downright nihilistic. And early screenings of their art-house opus, Electroma, evoked (unfortunately accurate) comparisons to Vincent Gallo’s on-the-road/oral sex epic Brown Bunny (except with endless scenes of hunk-o-metal ennui filling in for the graphic oral sex). After the shattering pop breakthrough of 2001’s Discovery, Daft Punk were going through an especially angsty adolescence—their spit-shined heads way up their own asses. But then, amped-up with enough electricity to illuminate a black hole, French house’s masked men upstaged Madonna, previous electronic pioneers Depeche Mode, and (ironically) Kanye West at 2006’s Coachella. And now, they’re everywhere (except Gap ads, thankfully)—getting sampled on No. 1 hip-hop songs, filling magazine spreads, spawning worthy would-be successors and, of course, owning the internet (on Flickr, Daft Punk photos currently outnumber Justin Timberlake snaps 2:1). With a bounty of latent good will on their side thanks to the incredible re-playability of their first two albums, Daft Punk finally gave fans a million flashing reasons to fall in love with them all over again. One of the most remarkable aspects of Alive 2007 is how well it recontextualizes career nadir Human After All, turning previously leaden songs into ebullient rock’n’roll manifestos; injected with Homework’s air-tight Moroder-style anthems or Discovery’s flamboyant funk, Human After All tracks are constantly improved and born anew. The live set doesn’t simply run through the hits, mindlessly segueing from one smash to another. Instead, well-worn favorites are glued together, cut-up and mashed into pieces. The titular refrains of “Television Rules the Nation” and “Around the World” combine to form the globe’s most dance-friendly TV station theme song before the Black Sabbath crunch of “Television” is sent down upon the impossibly buoyant “Crescendolls,” resulting in the disc’s most unlikely-yet-spectacular roller coaster peak. Meanwhile, the creepy hiss of “Steam Machine” is atomized and given space-age dynamics, turning it from a oddball bore into a fist-pumping celebration of the industrial age. Wisely, the duo also know when to let the bass be, allowing large portions of unfuckwithable classics like “Da Funk” and “Burnin’” to work their magic with little robo-meddling. Even without video, Alive 2007 is an exercise in exacting excess, from the blaring “Robot Rock” intro to a wide-eyed power-booster of a encore that layers “One More Time" atop “Music Sounds Better With You”—a combination so “holy shit” ecstatic it would seem downright cocky if it wasn’t so blissful. Talking about the relationship between artist and audience, Bangalter told Paper, “Robots don’t make people feel like there’s an idol on stage. It’s more like a rave party where the DJ isn’t important. We are two robots in this pyramid with this light show, but everything is [meant] for you to have fun and enjoy yourself.” He’s absolutely right about the “have fun and enjoy yourself” bit, but the Alive tour separated itself from the millions of DJ parties before it by drawing attention to a fixed point while incorporating everything from Kiss-esque pomp to Space Invaders retro-future shock. The results were massive—the myriad “best show ever” kudos deserved. And, just as they hold back their identities at every chance, it makes sense for Daft Punk to hold back the Alive visuals; when more and more mystery is constantly being sucked out of popular music thanks to the insatiable hunger for fresh product and up-to-the-nanosecond information, the duo aren’t about to release an imagination-stifling DVD filled with behind-the-scenes tour bus inanity. It’s a noble choice, especially when the consolation prize happens to be the Ultimate Daft Punk Mixtape.

2007-11-20T01:00:01.000-05:00

2007-11-20T01:00:01.000-05:00

Electronic

Virgin

November 20, 2007

03806f6c-2b85-42be-bb3a-00df21dad1e9

Ryan Dombal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/

On their collaboration with the Alchemist, the duo of ELUCID and billy woods drag postcolonial wounds onto the examination table. They don't just embrace the darkness; they wear it as a protective cloak.

On their collaboration with the Alchemist, the duo of ELUCID and billy woods drag postcolonial wounds onto the examination table. They don't just embrace the darkness; they wear it as a protective cloak.

Armand Hammer / The Alchemist: Haram

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/armand-hammer-the-alchemist-haram/

Haram

The duo of ELUCID and billy woods, standing at the vanguard of the NYC underground rap scene, make claustrophobic rap songs that are at once hypercritical of society and empathetic towards its humanity. Their latest LP, Haram, a collaboration with mafioso rap maven the Alchemist, might be their most accessible yet, a beacon for the like-minded, a way for creatively gifted kooks to feel less alone. But while some rappers will go to great lengths to break down their rhymes and coded imagery into digestible bits for the mainstream listener, this is an educational exchange with which Armand Hammer seem wholly uninterested in engaging. ELUCID and woods manage to wield irony without becoming poisoned by it; This is rap music decrying gentrification and capitalist oppression made by a group named after a billionaire industrialist with ties to the Soviet Union. They exude a general distrust of governments and the world at large through a cannabis-tinged cloud of paranoia, dropping periodic reminders from the past that these sentiments are not unreasonable. Armand Hammer make Brooklyn rap by way of Africa, pulling the wounds of postcolonialism out of the history books and onto the examination table. Haram is an Arabic term—analogous to the Hebrew traif—that represents everything forbidden by Islam. The album’s packaging is covered in graphic depictions of its most common signifiers; butchered pig heads, marijuana cigarettes, a firearm, alcohol. The record itself is a jump-off for explorations of taboo, an examination of the dogma that tends to codify our lives. On “Chicharrones,” they skewer latent homophobia (“Got caught with the pork/But you gotta kill the cop in your thoughts still saying ‘pause.’”), on “Roaches Don’t Fly,” they implore us to rethink our sense of meaning (“Bounce per ounce, more, what counts?/Kill your landlord, no doubt, asymmetric unconventional extremist/make meaning”). The Alchemist’s hypnotic loops give this record a more subdued texture than a typical Armand Hammer album. A master of mood, the producer paints an abstract noir with morose piano samples and plodding bass lines. On “Falling Out the Sky,” a sampled David Lynch ponders the semi-consciousness of daydreams, and Earl Sweatshirt sounds even more lethargic than usual—though his wit remains as sharp as ever. Haram is uncharacteristically jazzy, alternating between smoky downtown lounge vibes (“Robert Moses”) and disjointed trumpet croons and operatic vocal loops (“Peppertree”). For someone with such a distinct and recognizable style, Al seems to embrace the chaos that woods and ELUCID manifest; each song feels like a puzzle with all its pieces snipped and trimmed and reassembled. Armand Hammer are breathtakingly prolific, with solo albums and various distinct collaborations in addition to the four records they’ve made together in the last four years. They write story raps, political screeds, even love songs. Yet the common thread is a sense that they constantly seek to challenge, not so much the listener, but themselves. Colored by the Alchemist’s palette, Haram offers another perspective of New York City’s hard heart, rooted in ruminations on power and how it’s wielded. These are the spiritual descendants of Def Jux, rappers that not only embrace the darkness, but wear it as a protective cloak. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-03-31T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Backwoodz Studioz

March 31, 2021

03807a3d-29f8-4658-969a-725924374db9

Matthew Ismael Ruiz

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ismael ruiz/

Airplane Mode is a purposely unfinished project, meant to tide us over until Ty Dolla $ign's major-label debut Free TC arrives. It doesn't reveal much about the singer/rapper that we don’t already know: He’s still caught up in a tidal wave of women, drugs, money, and never-ending parties. But it's effortless and engaging, and on a few moments, he offers a hint of soul.

Airplane Mode is a purposely unfinished project, meant to tide us over until Ty Dolla $ign's major-label debut Free TC arrives. It doesn't reveal much about the singer/rapper that we don’t already know: He’s still caught up in a tidal wave of women, drugs, money, and never-ending parties. But it's effortless and engaging, and on a few moments, he offers a hint of soul.

Ty Dolla $ign: Airplane Mode

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21224-airplane-mode/

Airplane Mode

Ty Dolla $ign (born Tyrone Griffin, Jr.) has cultivated an aesthetic as grimy as it is sexy: His party songs feel sleazy, and his sex songs feel like they're happening in public. You could see glimpses of this direction from his beginnings as one half of the duo Ty & Kory, but it wasn’t until he went solo that he developed the persona that made him a star. He has the skill to make his woozy, grainy songs about parties and women seem so effortless that sometimes it looks like he’s not even trying, which is evident on his latest tape, Airplane Mode. Airplane Mode feels designed as an afterthought, a placeholder to keep Ty’s buzz afloat until his major label debut, Free TC, arrives. Yet it’s cohesive and engaging even when multiple songs cut out in the middle of verses. This is a purposely unfinished project, one that doesn’t reveal much about Ty that we don’t already know: "I’m a pop a molly, pop a percocet, sippin' Actavis/ My momma mad at me, told me I spend too much money/ I’ve been buying bottles like sure, what, you only live once," he raps on "Do Thangs". He’s still caught up in a tidal wave of women, drugs, money, and never-ending parties. "Back in the City" and "Money Ruin Friendships" are satisfying records that showcase both Ty’s charming singing voice and his gift for making a DJ Mustard beat feel fresh again. But songs like "No Fake Shit" and "All" are more intriguing, because they hint at a larger "there" with Ty Dolla $ign. "No Fake Shit" is a deeply caring love song and "All" hints at the trappings and boredom of fame. More importantly, the latter ends with a voicemail from his brother TC, who is currently serving a life sentence. The brief moment gives the EP a hint of soul and signals that Ty might have something more to say to us. Airplane Mode isn't quite that place, though. There are two references to the EP title here, both telling: "These days gotta keep my phone on airplane mode/ To dodge these hoes," Ty croons on the title track. The second comes from TC’s message from jail. In it, TC he acknowledges that Ty’s phone probably went straight to voicemail because it’s on airplane mode, as if this is a common occurrence. Airplane mode is the setting you put your electrical device in to completely disconnect it from the network. You can’t get text messages, phone calls, or access any apps needing the Internet and, at the risk of sounding precious, it is a bit of a metaphor for Ty Dolla $ign the persona. Disconnected from the outside world, yet still functioning in it, he’s garnered a steady buzz and made plenty of great songs by projecting a disaffected cool.

2015-10-22T02:00:02.000-04:00

2015-10-22T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rap

self-released

October 22, 2015

0385d088-98df-405f-b843-df9c2ab183d7

Israel Daramola

https://pitchfork.com/staff/israel-daramola/

The rapper's collaborative album with British producer Paul White finds them both in fine form, with Eagle's peculiar sense of storytelling fitting perfectly with White's ’70s-inspired beats.

The rapper's collaborative album with British producer Paul White finds them both in fine form, with Eagle's peculiar sense of storytelling fitting perfectly with White's ’70s-inspired beats.

Paul White / Open Mike Eagle: Hella Personal Film Festival

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21617-hella-personal-film-festival/

Hella Personal Film Festival

Mike Eagle doesn’t rap; he talks to you in rhythmic form, calmly unpacking his narrative as the world around him spirals out of control. Emcees like Eagle, Action Bronson, Aesop Rock, and Homeboy Sandman have this uncanny way of drawing you into what they say, despite unusual references that don’t always connect. Theirs is a conversational cadence full of random observations; and with Eagle, he can discuss wrestler Rick Martel’s cologne and the struggles of being a black man with the same verve, even if those topics are completely dissimilar. Eagle comes off like the everyman with whom you can talk about anything, an alternative to trap-rap, although he’s dexterous enough to drift in all sorts of directions. Take last year’s “Raps for When It’s Just You and the Abyss” as an example: Beneath a slow churning instrumental, you can see Eagle methodically pacing back and forth, pulling disparate factoids from his brain: “Was pretty geeked about my L.A. Weekly feature/ I showed it to my dad, my barber and my piano teacher.” On “A History of Modern Dance,” the Jeremiah Jae-produced standout of Eagle’s Dark Comedy LP, he connects equally scattered thoughts using melodic flows: “People walk into circles … every audience listens … they taking turns judging … everybody got issues.” It doesn’t matter how Eagle conveys his messages, the songs end up feeling direct and honest, as if he’s looking you squarely in the face to make sure you get the point. There’s no shortage of peculiar insight on Hella Personal Film Festival, Eagle’s collaborative album with British producer Paul White. On “Drunk Dreaming,” he envisions President Obama in a small drone and sees Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on a moving bus. He flubs rhymes on “I Went Outside Today” and trails off slightly on “Dive Bar Support Group.” The mistakes probably wouldn’t work for most rappers, but in Eagle’s case, it makes him even more relatable. For roughly 46 minutes, he observes life with the same gusto he always has, except these songs play like short movies set in a different era. The track titles are quirky—“Dang is Invincible,” “A Short About a Guy That Dies Every Night,” “Admitting the Endorphin Addiction”—and the content is largely esoteric, yet Eagle tempers it just enough for broader consumption. On “Check to Check,” for instance, he riffs on society’s obsession with smartphones, the fact that we can’t function without looking at our devices every few minutes. White creates a frenetic cosmic funk beat that exemplifies life’s rapid pace, and Eagle darts through it with a nervous energy that complements the track: “Battery getting low, but it’s not quite out yet/ So check, I’m in ya house now checkin’ for outlets/ I need to use maps ‘cause I don’t know the route yet/ I need to see an email, I don’t know when the soundcheck.” The song, which sits near the album’s beginning, is the best example of Eagle and White’s synergy. The beat shifts with each verse, growing more infectious as the rapper grows more restless. Festival feels steeped in ’70s soul—from the guitar lick on “Admitting the Endorphin Addiction” to the Curtis Mayfield-style harp on “I Went Outside Today.” White’s music fades further back as the album plays; songs like “Protectors of the Heat” and “Insecurity Part II” are made up of simple mouth clicks, light drums, and scant keys. Overall, the album begins quickly before it slows to a moderate pace, on which Eagle fills the second half with self-assessing thoughts on race (“Smiling”) and societal despair (“Reprieve”). It makes sense that Eagle and White would come together for a project like this. Separately, they hit similar creative marks and speak to the same alt-rap demographic, despite taking divergent paths to get there. Festival is refreshingly cohesive, exploring varied themes without drifting off-course. Then again, that’s not saying much for Eagle and White, who’ve long established their own unique lanes. These songs foreshadow a much larger story, one that only these two can tell.

2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-03-21T01:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rap / Rock

Mello Music Group

March 21, 2016

03864292-7aeb-40dd-a64c-99775904d1ea

Marcus J. Moore

https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/

EVOL arrives less than a month after Future's surprise mixtape Purple Reign, and while it has slightly more misses than hits, the highs are high—arguably higher than Purple Reign's—and ultimately, the lows aren't enough to break his current all-timer run.

EVOL arrives less than a month after Future's surprise mixtape Purple Reign, and while it has slightly more misses than hits, the highs are high—arguably higher than Purple Reign's—and ultimately, the lows aren't enough to break his current all-timer run.

Future: EVOL

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21578-evol/

EVOL

There's a hilarious Photoshopped image of Future posed with all of the Lakers' Larry O'Brien trophies, and it underlines a point: Greatness is often measured by how consistently it is delivered, and until he releases something genuinely bad, every album, EP, mixtape, or loose track Nayvadius Cash releases is just another morsel in his current all-timer run. When this run ends, we can look back and sort out what was transcendent, what only seemed good, and what kinda sucked. EVOL, his surprise album, arrives less than a month after his surprise mixtape* Purple Reign,* and while it has slightly more misses than hits, the highs are high—arguably higher than Purple Reign's—and ultimately, the lows don't matter. The 1995-96 Bulls are one of the three best teams of all time, but that doesn't make the 1998 Bulls' championship mean less than the other five. Purple Reign went to some dark places, but something about its brevity, and the finality of its closing duo of solemn tracks, felt like an attempt at turning the page, finding a new way forward. Future had seen the dark wood, and now he was sorting it out. EVOL stalls at this fork. It's billed as something of a minor release (in the same way What a Time to Be Alive was minor but they still wanted your money for it), but it's still an "official" one, meaning Future swings for a few radio hits here. They feel more obligatory than outright bad: Of the big brash odes to decadence Future has been doing post-Honest, "Lil Haiti Baby" is the keeper, with a punishing low end recalling the extreme maximalism Lex Luger perfected in 2011. Future stretches his voice to the breaking point, and while it's often been the thing carrying his pathos, here he's screaming "I just wanna go back to the Bentley store" like an addict who's totally fallen off the path. The album boasts some of Future's more interesting beats since 56 Nights or "I Serve the Base," particularly "Photo Copied," which pops and boops like "Beez in the Trap"'s cousin, and the sing-song patter of "Xanny Family" which uses an ultra-repetitive hook to mesmerizing effect. "Low Life" has the sultriness of House of Balloons/*Thursday-*era Weeknd, when Abel still seemed like a mysterious, hedonistic force, and Future's by-the-numbers bars reinforce the feeling that it is, in fact, a Weeknd track featuring Future. It ends up an album highlight. "Lie to Me," arguably the album's best song, scrapes the maximal, spacey landscape Future's so skillfully explored before, and it's the moment where Future communicates most clearly what's behind his tremendous output—it's not the breakup, it's not the decadence, it's not the success, it's the combination of all three. He sounds paranoid, protective, and manipulative, flatly admitting "I got way, way too many issues." As Future stretches this championship run as far as he can, we can wonder: How good can he get? How much longer can this last? When does this become numbing? The answers remain to be seen, but two months into 2016, two minor-yet-good releases don't show a sign of slowing down.

2016-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

2016-02-11T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Epic / Free Bandz

February 11, 2016

038811c3-8894-472e-8179-d55cb04bcef2

Matthew Ramirez

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matthew-ramirez/

Anchored by inquisitive musicianship and the mercurial vocals of Isaac Wood, the London-based group’s debut creates a post-punk safe haven for unfiltered pretension and paranoia.

Anchored by inquisitive musicianship and the mercurial vocals of Isaac Wood, the London-based group’s debut creates a post-punk safe haven for unfiltered pretension and paranoia.

Black Country, New Road: For the first time

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/black-country-new-road-for-the-first-time/

For the first time

When Black Country, New Road perform live, any member of the septet can take the spotlight. No sooner than a bassline has rumbled in, an antic guitar riff grabs the mic, followed by another, each slipping into conversation before working up a temper. Keys tumble from swooshing violins into the abyss of a tooting saxophone. Off to one side, a figure recites chronicles of youthful arrogance and sexual dysfunction, like Nick Cave if he read Twitter instead of the Bible. Their handiwork is hammered together by what sounds like a supercut of prog-rock drum solos. On record, the London-based group’s pounding heart is unmistakably Isaac Wood. The 22-year-old wordsmith commands the studio while enunciating lyrics with a pompous-prefect quiver. Hearing their recordings for the first time, you might oscillate between irritation and intrigue. You might cringe, then cringe harder, almost enjoying it this time. It may feel like catching a sworn enemy at an open-mic night and realizing, aghast, that he is destined for brilliance. Paradoxically, it is Wood’s mercurial character—his flamboyant self-scrutiny, deft comic instinct, immunity to embarrassment—that anchors the mania of Black Country, New Road’s debut album For the first time. Their portentous crescendos and surges of Jewish klezmer music set the pace, making post-rock sound improbably carnivalesque. That none of their experiments feel gimmicky speaks to a diverse and inquisitive musicianship; violinist Georgia Ellery, for one, also plays in outfits like the pliable pop duo Jockstrap and a wily ensemble called the Happy Bagel Klezmer Orkester. As with contemporaries Squid, Black Country, New Road are releasing their debut on a vaunted electronic label, escaping the constraints—whether symbolic or actual—of the indie-rock ecosystem. Recorded quickly last March, when the members were barely 20, For the first time documents the first 18 months of the band’s output. Debut single “Athens, France,” originally released by the high-concept label and monologue-rock incubator Speedy Wunderground, is rerecorded and shorn of Wood’s copious lines about fucking, perhaps to expunge the “regrettably one-dimensional female characters” he says populated the band’s early songs. In truth, the rewrite could have gone further, because a new-notepad smell lingers behind his moreish couplets. “It’s a one-size-fits-all hardcore cyber-fetish early noughties ’zine,” begins one. “She sells matcha shots to pay for printing costs and a PR team.” A delightful snapshot, but without some development—or a glossy melody to pucker it up—the image pixelates, stuck between story and poem. Wood’s most alluring lyrics offer glimpses of a higher, often sinister logic. The unreliable narrator of “Science Fair” (having performed, winkingly, with “the world’s second-best Slint tribute act”) attends the Cirque Du Soleil and leaves us a breadcrumb trail of clues. There is a seductive acrobat—the narrator, drunk, believes she is eyeing him up. A moment later, he snaps from a trance and stages a panicked exit. Why are children crying? And how, in all this, did he end up with “sticky hands”? The three-act, nine-minute single “Sunglasses” is no less confounding. The narrator is in his wealthy girlfriend’s kitchen, contemplating a brilliantly naff future together: “I become her father/And complain of mediocre theater in the daytime/And ice in single malt whiskey at night.” Then the camera pivots: first to a sauntering character who is “invincible in these sunglasses”—cue saxophonist Lewis Evans with a deliciously mocking counter-melody—and later to a romantic quarrel, just ludicrous enough to ring true. “I’m more than adequate,” snaps the outraged lover, rebuking some off-camera slight. “Leave Kanye out of this!” These dizzyingly ambitious capers are where Black Country, New Road come into their own: wordy, abrasive, rhapsodic, absurd. They epitomize the recent wave of British “sprechgesang”—mostly young, sardonic speaker-songwriters using flinty post-punk to skewer suspect worldviews, starting with their own. Wood’s self-portraits exaggerate not only rote neuroses but also status anxieties and delusions of grandeur. When the haughty “Sunglasses” narrator admits to a fear of “roadmen”—similar to the classist “chav” archetype—Wood is satirizing both thin-skinned snobs and the band’s own middle-class presentation. Instead of pursuing relatability, this comic autofiction creates a haven for unfiltered pretension and paranoia—somewhere to write from and about privilege without insincere self-flagellation, but without quite being a dick about it, either. Given their meticulous songwriting perspective, it is curious that the band’s most soulful song, “Track X,” is a total curveball: an orchestral ballad of confessional lyrics and Reichian precision. As strings, sax, and piano putter out a percussive dreamscape, Wood murmurs about a Biblical sacrifice and issues a romantic declaration “in front of black midi.” Instead of something witty, his chorus is a fragment: “I guess/In some way...” Maybe he is holding back, or perhaps the ellipsis is a final subversion—this time of his own schtick. For the tirelessly articulate, to be lost for words is the greatest freedom of all. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.) Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

2021-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

Experimental / Rock

Ninja Tune

February 9, 2021

03885f69-af1f-436d-bf6b-85f787b2fbc9

Jazz Monroe

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jazz-monroe/

One of the de facto leaders of the resurgent movement of John Fahey devotees, Jack Rose recorded this triumph shortly before his recent death.

One of the de facto leaders of the resurgent movement of John Fahey devotees, Jack Rose recorded this triumph shortly before his recent death.

Jack Rose: Luck in the Valley

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13950-luck-in-the-valley/

Luck in the Valley

In the early 2000s, while still a member of avant-drone group Pelt, Jack Rose found himself unemployed. Hunkering down at home with his acoustic guitar, he returned to the country blues he had abandoned years before when a teacher told him it wasn't worth trying if he couldn't sing. Woodshedding diligently, Rose became a masterful finger-style player, adept at bluegrass, ragtime, pre-war folk, Indian ragas, and more-- and started a solo career that would eventually make other employment unnecessary. His timing was fortuitous. The 1990s/2000s resurgence of John Fahey as an underground guitar hero inspired reams of skilled new players, including Glenn Jones, Ben Chasny, Harris Newman, James Blackshaw, and Nick Schillace. Rose became one of the de facto leaders of this loose movement, and his music seemed to grow and expand because of the company, or perhaps the competition. Each subsequent solo album revealed advances in technique and imagination, culminating in 2005's wide-ranging Kensington Blues. Rose also toured and collaborated more frequently as the decade progressed, sharing space and sounds with everyone from Mogwai to British folk legend Michael Chapman to Black Twig Pickers, a bluegrass offshoot of Pelt. That's why the shock of his sudden death last December at age 38 was so resonant, rippling through the many corners of underground music he had visited. That shock is even more palpable now that his final album, Luck in the Valley, has been released. It's a big, bold work, just the way Rose was a big, bold guy-- confident, honest, and forthright, sometimes to a fault, but always with huge heart. This forceful poise is what distinguished him from his predecessors and peers. Though his playing was often intricate and subtle, it was never hesitant, always supremely assured. And Luck in particular was intended to be big. As Rose told Foxy Digitalis in 2007, "Kensington Blues is a really hard record to live up to. So [the next one]'s just gotta be really good." Indeed, he outdid himself-- Luck isn't just good, it's great. And it makes the stunning silence of his absence, already as large as his burly persona, feel even larger. Luck's size comes from the diversity of its sounds and the wealth of its partnerships. Rose winds through a range of instrumentation and lineups, adding the braying fiddle of Mike Gangloff (of Pelt and Black Twig Pickers) to the hoe-down of "Lick Mountain Ramble", the downbeat banjo of Glenn Jones to the wistful "Moon in the Gutter", the ragtime piano of Hans Chew to the woozy waltz of W.C. Handy's classic "St. Louis Blues". But the jumps in style and context never jar, making the album less like a compendium then a suite of related themes. Many ideas and moods make up those themes, but the one that stands out most is joy. Rose injects a celebratory energy into every note, so even the most wistful moments-- my favorite is his poignant slide guitar on "Woodpiles on the Side of the Road"-- sound excited by the mere fact of their own existence. Of course, it's easy to see the work of those no longer with us through a sentimental prism, letting emotion bleed over into the perceived profundity of the music. But Luck in the Valley is so vibrant, engaging, and alive, it's hard to overestimate it. In fact, we've been robbed of how much greater it would sound if we could look forward to Rose playing these songs live, or building on them tomorrow the way he did yesterday. But no matter what the past has taken or the future holds, this is simply great music from a great musician. That, luckily, is something that neither life nor death can change.

2010-02-24T01:00:02.000-05:00

2010-02-24T01:00:02.000-05:00

Folk/Country

Thrill Jockey

February 24, 2010

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Marc Masters

https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/

The Australian trio’s debut album deals in radiant, anthemic indie rock, balancing doubt-ridden lyrics with clear-eyed execution.

The Australian trio’s debut album deals in radiant, anthemic indie rock, balancing doubt-ridden lyrics with clear-eyed execution.

Middle Kids: Lost Friends

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/middle-kids-lost-friends/

For a new band, Middle Kids come to the table with some ready-made talking points. Their lead singer, Hannah Joy, is a classically trained pianist who grew up singing church hymns. She recently married her multi-instrumentalist bandmate, Tim Fitz. Their drummer, Harry Day, studied jazz at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. And in short order, they’ve found an enthusiastic supporter in none other than Elton John. And yet none of these CV highlights have any bearing on what the Australian trio actually sounds like. Despite their highbrow credentials, Middle Kids are, at heart, a band for the people. With Joy largely forsaking the piano for guitar, they deal in the sort of radiant, anthemic indie rock that sounds right at home on in-store satellite-radio playlists or in the background of pivotal scenes on prime-time dramedies. And lest you think Joy and Fitz’s matrimonial dynamic puts Middle Kids in an advantageous position to usurp Yo La Tengo as the most unabashedly romantic trio in the indie-verse, their debut album uses its lacquered sound as a bonding agent to hold together vivid portraits of relationships falling apart. Lost Friends follows last year’s self-titled EP, whose rousing, Sir Elton-approved single “Edge of Town” reappears here to provide the thematic anchor for a record that’s all about fumbling your way through insecurities, indecision, and embarrassments. In singer/guitarist Joy, the band has a captivating mouthpiece who deftly navigates these emotional minefields with equal parts panic and poise, thanks to a naturally trembling voice that can harden into tough-love sentiment. Often, it’s directed at herself: On the country-tinged title track, she despondently waltzes through the wreckage of friendships she deliberately destroyed by “saying things I wouldn’t say” with just enough palpable regret to elicit our sympathies, while the inviting nocturnal atmosphere of “Bought It” conceals a cry for help from the back of the cab she used to escape an uncomfortable encounter with an ex. Joy’s no-filter straight talk can also be a source of comfort: On the rootsy rave-up “Don’t Be Hiding,” she offers warm assurance to a lover with body-image issues by singing, “You don’t have to sell it, I am sold/So give me all your garbage and your gold.” But the sound of Lost Friends is as celebratory as its lyrical tone is serious. The trio often comes off like a band twice its size, coloring in the standard guitar/bass/drums arrangements with a rich palette of piano, strings, pedal steel, and electronic textures. With breezy sing-alongs like “Mistake” and “On My Knees,” they effectively thread the winsome early-’90s alt pop of Belly and the Cranberries with the big-tent ambitions of ’00s-era ensembles like Arcade Fire and the National (whose go-to mixer, Peter Katis, rides the faders here). But while Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold. A number of tracks rely on the same trick, dropping out the instrumentation on the final chorus for dramatic effect (or, in the case of “Maryland,” resorting to the ol’ truck-driver gear change for extra uplift). “Please” is especially shameless in its bid for festival-conquering glory, as it rides the rumbling-tractor intro groove of Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” en route to a generically glossy chorus that sounds like it was grafted on by a Top 40 song doctor. If Lost Friends is ultimately defined by the contrast between its doubt-ridden lyrics and its confident, clear-eyed musical execution, the closing track, “So Long, Farewell, I’m Gone,” provides a tantalizing glimpse of what Middle Kids are capable of when they situate Joy’s nervous ruminations within an equally turbulent backdrop. Building up from an ominous repeated piano chord into a swirl of militaristic drum patterns, electronic oscillations, and crashing crescendos, the song foregrounds Middle Kids’ latent experimental tendencies without obscuring their intrinsic sing-along appeal. “When I was young I decided I was weird,” Joy declares; hopefully, she’ll stay true to her inner child, and in a few years time, we’ll be looking back at Lost Friends as Middle Kids’ Pablo Honey-style precursor to a more unpredictable path.

2018-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-05T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Domino

May 5, 2018

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Stuart Berman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/

On his new EP, producer Floating Points (nee Sam Shepherd) offers two extended tracks that occasionally sound like Neu! with steroids and 40 years of additional recording technology on their side.

On his new EP, producer Floating Points (nee Sam Shepherd) offers two extended tracks that occasionally sound like Neu! with steroids and 40 years of additional recording technology on their side.

Floating Points: Kuiper

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22119-kuiper/

Kuiper

Musicians work under different aliases for a number of reasons, the most prominent being to reset or deter expectations. This happens often in the world of dance or electronic music. There’s often a certain utility to it, with producers siloing off their house and techno works, knowing they’ll appeal to different audiences. Sometimes the reasoning is more pragmatic: to avoid legal problems or, for the prolific, to ease DJs into buying multiple records by a single artist. Floating Points, nee Sam Shepherd, has avoided hitting the moniker-reset button despite vast differences between his early work (soulful house music), last year’s Elaenia (jazzy, electronic composition) and his work as a DJ (in which he spins anything he can get you to dance to, from Brazilian obscurities to disco edits to dub). On his new EP Kuiper, Shepherd makes radical moves even between the two side-long tracks. First up is the title track, a burly, 18-minute groove recorded with his Elaenia touring band. The least polite moment in a well-mannered discography, “Kuiper” finds the band clenching its fist and revving up to a stormy kosmische pace, like Neu! with steroids and 40 years of additional recording technology on their side. It’s a setup that downplays Shepherd’s modular synthesizer in favor of a squall of live-sounding drums and eighth-note bass plucks. The feel is not dissimilar to the extended jams that other live/electronics bands like LCD Soundsystem and Caribou (Dan Snaith and Shepherd often DJ together) end songs with, though the pealing guitar adds a dash of prog. The moody guitar solo at the end is deflating endpoint to a well-trodden path, but Shepherd’s band nonetheless exhibits a rare combination of restraint and brawn. The second track, “For Marmish Part II,” is nominally a riff on the Elaenia track of the same name. It’s a return to the composed elegance of that album, 14 minutes of Shepherd varying short, meditative riffs on his Rhodes piano and cooing wordlessly. There’s very little build, and the overall feel is almost Reich-ian in its simplicity and focus, at least until the massive, subby kick drum ruptures the surface, Shepherd's synthesizer circling above like a flock of gulls. It’s a beautiful contrast, and one that highlights Shepherd’s continued interest in clarity and fidelity. These are masterful recordings that, despite their style, shouldn’t really be seen as headphone music; a good stereo system will reveal additional detail, especially in the low end. “For Marmish Part II” climaxes with a series of massively distorted kicks, rending the calm Shepherd’s organ so meticulously created. Shepherd has made an odd transformation, originally working in a medium (house music) largely reliant on samples, and ending up the maestro of a band playing the types of obscure styles—post-rock, minimal composition, jazzy prog—that often end up as sample fodder. His commitment to quality and easy lilting melodies help him stand out, but it’s a little disappointing that his polyglot taste as a DJ doesn’t rear its head more often in his recorded material. Still, Kuiper extends the graceful Elaenia, even mussing its well-kept hair on the title track. For now, at least, this is what we can think of when we think of Floating Points.

2016-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-22T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Luaka Bop / Pluto

July 22, 2016

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Andrew Gaerig

https://pitchfork.com/staff/andrew-gaerig/

The UK duo of vocalist Aluna Francis and producer George Reid make future-pop songs that mix their love of old Timbaland and Neptunes-produced hits with an indie-leaning sensibility. Their full-length debut shares songs with their well-received EP and further streamlines their sound.

The UK duo of vocalist Aluna Francis and producer George Reid make future-pop songs that mix their love of old Timbaland and Neptunes-produced hits with an indie-leaning sensibility. Their full-length debut shares songs with their well-received EP and further streamlines their sound.

AlunaGeorge: Body Music

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18298-alunageorge-body-music/

Body Music

Music fandom often follows a slow boomerang trajectory: listen to top-40 radio through your tween and early teen years, reject those impulses in favor of more cerebral, left-of-center music as you're growing up, lean back toward pop as you settle into adulthood. The last couple of years have found a crop of young independent artists boldly attempting to reconcile those stages of their own listening life cycles, walking a tightrope of poptimism and experimentalism to create confectionary, homespun electronic music that’s sometimes described as future-pop. Grimes gushes about Mariah Carey and Aphex Twin in the same breath; Canadian duo Purity Ring have listed “Justin Timberlake, Clams Casino, and Holy Other” as inspirational forces behind their prismatic fairy tales; Glaswegian electro trio Chvrches have spoken about loving Fugazi and the Cure in interviews before divulging plans to cover Whitney Houston’s “It’s Not Right, But It’s Okay” in live shows. These omnivorous tendencies-- along with the breakdown of genre boundaries and advancement of affordable home recording technology-- have created inviting territory for the cleverest and most enterprising young musicians to explore. Another intriguing act within the growing corral of future-pop artists is AlunaGeorge, a UK duo comprised of vocalist Aluna Francis and producer George Reid. When the two began giving interviews last year, they mentioned their love of old Timbaland and Neptunes-produced hits along with affinities for Radiohead, the Knife, and Joanna Newsom. Together the pair have adeptly synthesized those tastes and perfected a futuristic sound that blends wonky, wobbly beats drawn from 2-step and glitch with the irresistible hooks of “TRL”-era pop and the 90s R&B it was heavily indebted to. A decade ago, Aluna Francis might have been a long-lost member of Dream, the all-girl group behind the sleeper hit “He Loves U Not”, or a contestant on Diddy’s ill-fated “Making the Band”. The pair’s lyrics can even feel as though they were written for young teens of an era before smartphones and social media platforms mediated pubescent growing pains. “I usually wait for you to call/ But it’s getting closer between me and you,” Francis laments on the balladesque new song “Friends to Lovers”. “How do you make the change from friends to lovers/ When you risk looking like a fool?” Following last year’s EP on Brooklyn label Tri Angle, their debut album Body Music arrives on a major (Island in the UK, the indie Vagrant in the U.S.); about half of its songs are new. The collection is a remarkably seamless extension of their early songs, an expert execution of a concept and aesthetic that felt perfectly crystallized even before anyone knew who the duo were. While there’s nothing on Body Music that hits quite as hard as their breakout hit, the crystalline R&B song “You Know You Like It”, there’s hardly a weak track to be found (save a misguided bonus cover of Montell Jordan’s “This Is How We Do It”). They tinker with a bit of balladry (“Friends to Lovers”), niche dance genres (“Lost & Found”), and lite disco-funk (“Kaleidescope Love”), but everything retains a uniformly slick veneer, propelled by Francis’ slightly warped, nasal vocals and ice-princess posture. There’s an enticing liquidity that carries over from the earlier material-- beyond lyrics like “I want to be a diver into the sea” and “I've been treading water for your love”, the songs can sound like water hitting hard, shiny surfaces, or like ice chips being shot though narrow chrome tubes. The entire album is sexy and strange and sugary all at once. That these songs were recorded over the course of a couple years (straddling a major-label deal) and still maintain total fluidity throughout speaks to the strength and maturity of the duo’s initial formula. But there, in the word formula, lies the catch. There's not much wrong with Body Music, but its constellation of contemporary electro-pop elements can sometimes feel too slick for its own good. Francis and Reid almost do themselves a disservice by being so competent, by executing a single, well-defined sound so consistently and so tidily that the record can begin to create a lull. That’s been the fate of some of AlunaGeorge’s peers as well: Purity Ring’s 2012 debut possessed the same paradoxically frustrating one-note perfection; Chvrches’ sound is crisp and singular enough that they could face a similar challenge. It’s also possible that the sheer number of artists springing up and inhabiting this sphere slackens the future angle in all this future-pop. For Francis and Reid, one possible escape from their shiny little box might be to further experiment with blossoming dance music trends-- something they successfully tried their hand at on a recent collaboration with Disclosure, another UK duo doing exciting, retro-futuristic things with newly malleable genre boundaries. But for now, it's hard to complain about AlunaGeorge being a little bit too focused.

2013-07-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

2013-07-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Vagrant / Island

July 29, 2013

038ed811-184b-497d-8f1c-1a80360f9d90

Carrie Battan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/carrie-battan/

You break all kinds of unwritten rules when you're a guy who admires a girl. The white suburban kids who idolize gangster rappers are old news, and the rich kids have always loved to rub elbows with the poor. But when a man tries to identify with a woman, he doesn't just hit the normal problems of "white male gaze" and "exploitation of the other" and "being a jackass": There's also the third rail of male sexuality, where identifying too closely with a woman might make you seem, perish the thought, sensitive. So instead, the guys who dig a girl

Liz Phair: Exile in Guyville [15th Anniversary Edition]

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11921-exile-in-guyville-15th-anniversary/

Exile in Guyville [15th Anniversary Edition]

You break all kinds of unwritten rules when you're a guy who admires a girl. The white suburban kids who idolize gangster rappers are old news, and the rich kids have always loved to rub elbows with the poor. But when a man tries to identify with a woman, he doesn't just hit the normal problems of "white male gaze" and "exploitation of the other" and "being a jackass": There's also the third rail of male sexuality, where identifying too closely with a woman might make you seem, perish the thought, sensitive. So instead, the guys who dig a girl like Liz Phair have to play up the attraction, the lust, the submission to a rock'n'roll goddess-- even when, for many of them, the lust ain't the main draw. The other tactic is to take credit for what she's done. And guys can take plenty of credit for Phair's early career. Rock critics like Bill Wyman brought Phair to Chicago's attention when they ranted and raved about Guyville weeks before the thing came out. The Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street, the loose template for Guyville's 18 tracks-- and one of the blues-rock genomes that saved this from being just another singer-songwriter set. And a couple other guys, co-producer Brad Wood and engineer Casey Rice, helped nail the minimalist production of Guyville and its follow-up, the underrated Whip-Smart. It was the guys like her Johnny or her Joe-- the titular guys in the indie boy's club centered in and around Chicago's Wicker Park-- who preened for her, dicked her over, and taught her how to push back, inspiring her and making it necessary for her to write these songs in the first place. And it was guys who took the piss when she started headlining at venues that were too big for an amateur. Playing a New Year's Eve show at the Metro as your sixth or seventh gig is a lot to bite off. And if I recall correctly, she bit. But stagecraft and starpower weren't the point: Those of us who were taken in by Phair loved her because she was-- sorry to use the word-- real. Men and women have written paeons to Phair since Guyville was released, putting her swagger, strength, and mundanity in whatever context meant the most to them-- "girl next door," "older sister," "younger sister," "easy lay," "slut next door," "bitch." But let's start with "female rocker." Guyville still runs up your spine on track one with its full-on opener, "6'1'", which is the best song she's ever recorded: tough but exposed, with cute feints in the lyrics, a wicked riff, and the door slamming open on her sassy tomboy vocals. On cuts like these, guys can dig Phair because she's one of the guys. The songs are mostly sprints or drones, and on relistening to it, it's striking to hear the full-band cuts next to the solitary head space of songs like "Glory" or "Shatter", where she's backed more by a memory of guitar than by the raunchy blues-rock of the album's other half. The production of the ballads replicates the intimacy of a bedroom recording without the tape hiss or bum notes, which is an awesome illusion; and only a beginning songwriter could make such elemental riffs sound so exciting. Phair has famously struggled to become a star, and never quite made it. Guyville turned her into an object of fascination, but those early gigs revealed she wasn't a superstar: She had to get by on talent, and perceptiveness. She has the gift of turning everyday downers into rock, and the shock came when she sang about things that nobody else discussed in public. The cover shot nipple, "I want to be your blow job queen," the outro of "Fuck and Run" ("...even when I was 12")-- this stuff was startling at the time, but I'm guessing it won't register with any teenagers who discover this today. You can get Savage Love right on your cell phone, and young adults today can browse mainstream blogs and read about machines that will fuck you. Sad to say that at the time, it was shocking to talk about non-missionary sex with the girl you could take home to mom, but today, on "Flower"-- the one about blow jobs-- the line that surprises is her Dungeons & Dragons-like reference to "minions.” (On the original, she said she'd fuck the guy's girlfriend.) Also hard to explain would be the sound, which is grey and wedged entirely in the midrange. When a "remastered" edition was announced, I had to wonder if the remasterer had actually heard the thing before taking the job-- but hearing it now, the treatment works: the rhythm section, when there is one, has more punch, and Phair's vocals come a little closer to your earlobe. The package also comes with a poorly-made DVD of interviews that Phair conducted with people from Chicago who knew her when-- Steve Albini, Ira Glass, the Urge Overkill guys. It makes a scene that fancied itself "the next Seattle" seem exactly as insular and provincial as it really was. More useful would have been a tighter focus on Phair-- say, a better set of her B-sides and demos. Would it have killed ATO to throw in more of her early, even less-inhibited Girly Sounds material? Three B-sides grace this reissue, including the meandering "Ant in Alaska" and a curious cover of Lynn Tait's "Say You". They're nice throwaways, but they explain little about what was going on around the making of her debut. Fifteen years on, Guyville occasionally sounds dated-- for its particular sexiness, and its particular indieness. But the songwriting holds up. She ticks off all the bruises and embarrassments of relationships, and never lets her defenses get in the way. Naturally as a guy, I can't speak for what women saw in the record back then, or how young women will take it now. But of all the albums written from a woman's perspective, this is one of the most accessible to men. It's intriguing to watch her deal with us-- not as a mere revolutionary, but as someone who knows that sex will always be tough, so she always has to be tougher. She's been tested in ways we never will be, and we understand just enough to admire her for it. Men don't get what it's like to be a woman. But spinning this record, you swear that you could.

2008-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

2008-06-23T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Liz Phair

June 23, 2008

038f838e-f50c-4af7-9568-75151a932773

Scott Plagenhoef

https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/

The neoclassical ambient duo’s first proper album in nine years pays tribute to the mystical painter Hilma af Klint in stirring strings, melancholy fanfare, and a winking hint of self-awareness.

The neoclassical ambient duo’s first proper album in nine years pays tribute to the mystical painter Hilma af Klint in stirring strings, melancholy fanfare, and a winking hint of self-awareness.

A Winged Victory for the Sullen: The Undivided Five

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/a-winged-victory-for-the-sullen-the-undivided-five/

The Undivided Five

To ambient fans, Adam Wiltzie is the marquee name in A Winged Victory for the Sullen, simply because he was also in Stars of the Lid. But to everyone else, it would probably be pianist Dustin O’Halloran. He won an Emmy for his Debussy-redolent Transparent theme, which wrings unaccountable amounts of nostalgia, sadness, and hope from a simple waltz. Shaping emotional resonance around other people’s art has been the neoclassical ambient duo’s main pastime since its self-titled debut in 2011. Following scores for film and one for the prominent choreographer Wayne McGregor, The Undivided Five is the second album to showcase what they can do working off of their own images and concepts. One might expect themes for an imaginary film, but this isn’t film music. It takes too long. Opener “Our Lord Debussy” traverses more than nine minutes at a kingly pace, the piano marching under high-flown regalia of strings and modular synths. There are few extractable moments because everything is interwoven; any time something is resolving, something else is taking shape. The effect is lush and orchestral, with rich bass notes in the piano and intimations of violin solos, but also mystically steeped in ambient music’s eternal present. Like everyone else since the Guggenheim retrospective, Wiltzie and O’Halloran have apparently fallen under the spell of Hilma af Klint, the proto-abstract painter and theosophist who partly developed her visual language in séances with a group of women called “The Five.” This accounts for the album’s predominance of perfect fifths—which girdle the timbral complexity in rings of harmonic stability—as well as its almost ecstatic, almost painful lyricism. If it’s not obvious, this is catnip for fans of Max Richter, Tim Hecker, and especially Jóhann Jóhannsson, the duo’s friend and collaborator, who died near the beginning of work on the album. Studio sessions ranged across several countries—Germany, Hungary, Belgium, a grand piano in the Italian woods, overdubs at Ben Frost’s Iceland digs—in search of arcane reverbs and other fine acoustical qualities, which Francesco Donadello’s analog mix gives a supple finish. Around the time of Jóhannsson’s death, O’Halloran found out he was having his first child, and The Undivided Five trembles on a threshold between sorrow and joy, ending and beginning, life and afterlife. Aching strings emerge like fated events from the everyday seep and curl of passing time. Long minutes pass by dredging up one vast, submerged chord. Each track is its own study in loneliness, yet each is in communication with the others, like spirit mediums. “Aqualung, Motherfucker” is an endless beginning, with a few purposeful strides trailing off in mid-air again and again. It doesn’t really take flight until the next song, “A Minor Fifth Is Made of Phantoms,” where melancholy fanfare is packed into growling sub-basses that will explode halfway through “Adios, Florida.” It’s a softly shocking climax before the music swiftly resumes its giant-tortoise composure. Yes, “Aqualung, Motherfucker.” Wiltzie and O’Halloran have a funny habit of impeccably observing the solemn, elevated conventions of ambient music, and then writing song titles that mock elevated solemnity. As their debut offered “Steep Hills of Vicodin Tears” and “We Played Some Open Chords,” The Undivided Five sad-trombones itself with “The Haunted Victorian Pencil” and “The Slow Descent Has Begun.” I’ve never quite figured out how to interpret this incongruity, which I kind of love. Maybe they’re just terrible at song titles? But I think they know what they’re doing. I like to imagine that it’s a reminder to themselves and us not to take all this mortal pomp too seriously, even as they aim to leave no soul unstirred. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-01-07T01:00:00.000-05:00

Experimental

Ninja Tune

January 7, 2020

03909bd4-acb0-48ff-82ea-c7cd584d19f4

Brian Howe

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/

Having relocated to L.A., the Atlanta rapper rapper brings his deadpan flow and subversive sense of humor to some of the strongest production he’s had yet, yielding a refreshingly mischievous album.

Having relocated to L.A., the Atlanta rapper rapper brings his deadpan flow and subversive sense of humor to some of the strongest production he’s had yet, yielding a refreshingly mischievous album.

Father: Awful Swim

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/father-awful-swim/

Awful Swim

Father’s music has always been flippant. That was part of the draw: He absorbed bleak topics like police brutality, selling drugs, and gun violence and warped them into shrug-worthy fodder with his alluring black humor. The nasal monotone of his flow is so blithe and dry that everything, no matter how weighty, sounds as casual as eating dinner. His breakout project, 2014’s Young Hot Ebony, built its momentum around the cult hit “Look at Wrist,” in which the Awful Records patriarch plainly admits, “Never had to flip a brick, but I get the gist.” Songs like “2 Dead, 6 Wounded” or “Everybody in the Club Gettin Shot” (from 2015’s Who’s Gonna Get Fucked First?) were similarly glib. But that trait is what makes Father so magnetic; he practically begs people to be offended—if only they could stop nodding. Mischief abounds on Awful Swim, his latest album. He takes the same acerbic style and adds more money, swag, and nonchalance. “Wrist got too heavy to pick up that bitch’s calls,” goes one line of the hook on opening track “Mirror, Mirror.” It lands as both a callback to that breakout single and a delight in how far he’s come. The Atlanta native and his crew inked a new deal with RCA earlier this year, and he’s relocated to Los Angeles. As far as major label debuts go, Awful Swim, which is also in partnership with Adult Swim, is a strong and remarkably vintage showing. It is a reflection of an artist with so little to worry about that all he can do is watch cartoons and crack jokes; it is also, perhaps, the refuge of a person who hasn’t lost touch with the real world. The album is fitted around ’90s-kid and millennial pop-culture staples. A sampling of the array of references includes “Empire,” Mulan, Justin Bieber, Talladega Nights, Vampire in Brooklyn, Blade, “Rick and Morty” (of course), and one clever turn of the mid-aughts Trap-A-Holics drop. The hook of the cartoonish-sounding “Sephiroth” is built around the waist-length hair of the “Final Fantasy” character. Meltycanon’s video-game-inspired production is a fitting backdrop for Father’s zippy lines (their earliest collaboration was 2016’s “Heartthrob,” which features Father rapping over a jewelry-box melody), and he handles the bulk of the production here, with six total credits. He and Father, who self-produced five tracks, have a symbiotic relationship: Meltycanon’s toy-chest style set against Father’s slurred delivery sounds like an alternate universe or a pleasant trip. “Only You” is a subdued haze of a club banger, propelled by guitar and a twinkling music-box sound, where Father’s idea of “romance” is something like “All these drugs in this bitch/But only you I wanna do.” The Rico Nasty-assisted “On One” chooses the drugs instead; her bursts of energy pop in contrast to his laidback cadence. But tucked into all the vice and hedonism are offhand comments that suggest Father isn’t interested in completely checking out. He may have graduated to Hollywood, but on the slinky “Private Show,” he knows nothing has truly changed: “Scary nigga, I’m a spooky black/You should probably alert your neighborhood watch/Every time a nigga move on the block/Crackers pull up with that burning cross.” A keen sense of racial awareness pops up over and over—particularly where the police are involved. “Keep starin’ in the rearview/Hope 12 don’t get me too,” he declares on “Sephiroth,” and, later, on “Dragons,” “12 shoot at me nigga, bet I shoot back.” Despite those fleeting moments, Awful Swim is, by and large, a playful release. As Father counts his money, collects women, and lobs threats to no one in particular, he genuinely sounds like he’s having a good time—inasmuch as his deadpan flow can suggest excitement. It’s a further realized version of his subversive humor combined with some of the strongest production he’s had yet. The time he spent away, slowing his releases from prolific to occasional, proved beneficial. He has managed the often-complicated feat of refining without compromising the unique qualities that drew so many to him in the first place. Free of the self-loathing emotion that many SoundCloud rappers default to and the self-righteous commentary that exists at the other end of the binary, Awful Swim is truly lighthearted at a time when a lot of rap really isn’t.

2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-09-29T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Adult Swim

September 29, 2018

0395150c-cf3f-4491-ab6c-08e1744ce450

Briana Younger

https://pitchfork.com/staff/briana-younger/

Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment serve as Chance the Rapper's touring band, and on Surf, he and the group tap into a wide-ranging, joyfully meandering spirit. The album touches on a multitude of ideas and moods, but above all, it's a celebration of friendship and a tribute to the alchemic power of collaboration.

Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment serve as Chance the Rapper's touring band, and on Surf, he and the group tap into a wide-ranging, joyfully meandering spirit. The album touches on a multitude of ideas and moods, but above all, it's a celebration of friendship and a tribute to the alchemic power of collaboration.

Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment: Surf

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20664-surf/

Surf

Surf begins like the Beach Boys and ends with the loping pop melody of a lost 1970s AM radio record. These moments bookend a world and a worldview; as its title suggests, the album is a musical vacation. Instead of following a straightforward path, Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment spill outward, finding new inlets and tributaries to explore. Surf contains multitudes, contradictions: ambitious, but playfully so; lighthearted in spirit but fiercely moral; wide-ranging in its influences, mapped onto a coherent whole. It's a new sound built on lots of older ones—indie, hip-hop, funk, rock, gospel, various strains of R&B, The Lion King soundtrack—and despite bringing on a large cast and letting each person play their part, the guests all exist on the Social Experiment's terrain. The album touches on many ideas and moods, but above all, is a celebration of friendship, and a tribute to the alchemic power of collaboration. Chance the Rapper's success allowed the group the space to take such a purposefully meandering approach. In the wake of his hugely successful sophomore tape Acid Rap, Chance ignored the industry's baits and lures. Freed from its constraints and pressures, with a devoted flock waiting eagerly behind him, he's directed his time and energy to his friends. So as you may have heard, this album does not belong to Chance the Rapper, but to Donnie Trumpet and the Social Experiment (that's Nico Segal and Peter "Cottontale" Wilkins, Nate Fox, Greg "Stix" Landfair Jr., and Chancelor Bennett himself). The group has extraordinary range, and thanks to time on the road as Chance's touring band, the chops to execute. But whatever the name on the packaging, this project does belong to Chance the Rapper: He is still the album's main draw, and despite the number of guests and the cover art billing, its guiding spirit feels reflective of his own ideas and values—albeit in a less intensive, less personal form than on Acid Rap. Donnie Trumpet, though, is our official headliner, and as such, the album intermittently features his horn's impressionistic interludes. On "Nothing Came to Me" and "Something Came to Me", his smeared, effects-laden playing recalls Don Ellis or Jon Hassell. But Donnie Trumpet also makes his presence known throughout the record, punctuating the marching band-meets-MJ dancefloor record "Slip Slide", or taking a fiery solo on "Just Wait". The overall sonic blueprint coheres gradually, as a diverse range of records bundle up a diverse range of sounds: say, a Bone Thugs-style harmony ("Just Wait"), a Rick James-style funk groove ("Wanna Be Cool"), or an "American Boy"-style disco record ("Go"). Despite the variety of influences and ideas, the vision coheres in the details: use of space, rhythmic variation, creative whimsy, a musicality that feels consciously shaped to convey levity, comfort, and freedom. Certain tracks feel more like frames without pictures, melted sandcastles rather than the fully functioning parapets of actual songs. In some sense, the constellation of sounds isn't far from a DJ mix. Think, maybe, of the beachfront party eclecticism of the Avalanches as produced by the Mizell Brothers and Kirk Franklin, heavily featuring the Art Ensemble of Chicago's Lester Bowie. But these pieces are linked in large part by the quirks of Chance's personality. And these quirks can sometimes be divisive. It's hard to imagine anyone could be mad at Chance: as rap stars go, he appears about as decent and well-adjusted as a person can possibly be. But he boldly and unapologetically embraces aesthetics that, historically, aren't fashionable, or are seen as uncool: the affected staginess of musical theater, the lyrical pretensions of slam poetry, a nostalgia not just for the memories of childhood, but the very feelings of childhood innocence. His debut project 10 Day stood out so starkly in its innocence, it was easy to see it as unconscious naivete; now, it seems quite purposeful, a point Chance makes explicit on "Wanna Be Cool", a song featuring Big Sean and KYLE with vocals from Jeremih. The record's message of self-love in the face of social pressure, and the fruitlessness of cool-chasing, aren't merely "Hip to Be Square" updates for 2015, but represents Chance's wider philosophical approach. Acid Rap, an easy critical favorite, dealt with "serious" subjects, autobiographical and sociopolitical, and implied a looming darkness: an artist who'd created a space for himself and his friends to flourish wrestled with the encroaching troubles of the outside world. Here, the anxiety is tamped down (we're on vacation, after all), and many songs indulge in the rhetoric of self-affirmation and positivity, like the gleeful release of a submerged balloon rushing to the surface. But this isn't a blind, didactic positivity: it often takes the shape of wisdom, and is actually quite practical, an argument and set of tools for living in the real world, as on the coda of "Slip Side": "It ain’t so easy, but it’s not so hard/ To stand up, stand up, but it’s just too easy to sit back down." (Alternately, the hook to "Just Wait"—"Good things come to those that wait"—repeated in a similar mantra format, is the rare moment more suited to a coffee mug.) But just as this album suggest a coherent personal philosophy, Chance resists taking himself too seriously, most explicitly on the ambiguous "Windows", which he's called his favorite song on the tape: "Don't trust a word I say." That record itself is driven primarily by its enigmatic lyrics and unusual composition, its vocals a tonal color, with foregrounded percussion. But if we are not to listen to his words, his actions provide an equally responsible blueprint: his generosity with the guest list is democratic in the extreme. Chance and Donnie elevate friends from his hometown (rappers Saba and Joey Purp, King Louie and Noname Gypsy) to equal footing with musical legends (Erykah Badu, Busta Rhymes) and established stars (Quavo from Migos, J. Cole). In several instances, it is the locals whose parts shine brightest: poet and singer Jamila Woods' feature on "Questions", in addition to providing tonal balance, is the album's emotive heart, a moment of elegiac reflection. The core of Chance's principled approach might suggest a line of continuity with Kendrick Lamar, and what the writer Reggie Ugwu described as his "radical Christianity." And certainly, his music is rooted in gospel, and he stakes a moral position when such stances are readily dismissed in certain corners. Church is even referenced explicitly in "Sunday Candy". But Chance's position on religion is elusive. "Sunday Candy" could certainly be read as a statement of religious intent, but it's first and foremost a song about familial love, and all of the particulars of Christianity become vivid, evocative associations not with spiritual life through religion, but through love of friends and family. There's a classic disco record by Dinosaur L—a group built around the avant-garde cellist and disco producer/songwriter Arthur Russell—called "Go Bang", popular at the Paradise Garage, in which vocalists shout out: "I want to see, all my friends at once!/ I'd do anything, to get the chance to go back!" In many ways, what feels fulfilling about Surf is in the fantasy of its creation: of musicians and friends who've secured the fanbase to experiment, working together to explore their creative impulses, letting each artist's fingerprints help shape a singular product. It's that sense of collaboration that energizes this project, and as much as this feels like an accomplishment already, it points equally to future possibilities. Chance has admitted to fantasies of Michael Jackson-level pop success, and while he's taking his time here, there's an element of looking to the future even in his rapping. While written with absolute precision and poetic skill that rivals the best rappers currently working, Chance's words tumble from his mouth effortlessly, as if he's already done with the verse by the time he recites it, looking to what's next.

2015-06-05T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-06-05T02:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B / Rap

self-released

June 5, 2015

03968043-61f6-4778-9200-c4eb1b025e00

David Drake

https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/

The Man in Black's vision of the American west is one of a rugged, mournful land, where outlaws carry ...

The Man in Black's vision of the American west is one of a rugged, mournful land, where outlaws carry ...

Johnny Cash: American IV: The Man Comes Around

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1331-american-iv-the-man-comes-around/

American IV: The Man Comes Around

The Man in Black's vision of the American west is one of a rugged, mournful land, where outlaws carry bibles over their hearts, and where sometimes, the good book even stops a bullet. The Man Comes Around is poised as the next chapter in Cash's darkling fairy tale, the fourth in an ongoing series of mostly-covers albums on which he gives material by some of today's most talented (or alternately, best-selling) artists his own aged slant. Now, time was, Johnny Cash covering a song like Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage" was a clever novelty made impressive by his ability to infuse these modern-day rockers with overwhelming emotion. Cash's renditions of songs like Nick Cave's "The Mercy Seat" and Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire" weren't so surprising, but far more powerful, as the spirit of those songs was so close to his own. The simple truth, of course, is that Cash's talent is such that he can elevate nearly any song to which he turns his ear. But on this, his fourth go-round on the same theme, it hardly seems necessary anymore; the songs of this record are taken from the most disparate ends of the musical spectrum, to no apparent end but show that he can do it. The first tragic subject of this case study is, almost predictably, Trent Reznor. (We knew it was just a matter of time, didn't we? I give it one more album before he gets around to Tool's "Schism.") The curriculum: "Hurt". Now, I'm not a big advocator of the NIN sound, but I'll give "Hurt" that it's got a fine melody, and its arrangement here is fantastic. Cash treats the song with such sincerity and honesty that it takes on a power that it never held in Reznor's hands, infusing it with genuine heart to accompany the bitterness. But that's just it-- could Cash really fail to bring something to this desolate ballad? It's like taking target practice at the Empire State Building. There's no challenge here-- it's just driving home a point. (And incidentally, those of you anticipating the line, "I wear this crown of shit," will be sorely disappointed.) Still, from the slithering blues groove of "Personal Jesus" to a surprisingly subtle duet with Fiona Apple on "Bridge Over Troubled Water", Cash never falters. Gorgeous, minimal arrangements highlight his emotive baritone and distill each track to its finest essentials. However, when an album consists of twelve covers and only three originals, something more than pretty arrangements is necessary, and it's called cohesion. Cash's renditions are often breathtaking in their simplicity, but rarely do they justify their presence among a dozen other similarly afflicted songs. A few exceptions are able to rise above, of course. "Hung My Head" is, and always has been, more Johnny Cash's than Sting's, and there's no disputing it now. And Cash and his understudy Nick Cave do justice to fellow Country hall-of-famer Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry". In these tracks, Cash finds something more than excellent composition and heartfelt regret-- he taps into the essence of each song and truly makes it his own. If he could have done this more often, and with a better selection of songs, the bulk of this record wouldn't be overshadowed by the cataclysmic magnitude of its original title track. And the weaknesses of the covers wouldn't be half as apparent if they weren't thrown into such stark contrast with an original that could stand proudly alongside "Folsom Prison Blues" or "I Walk the Line". The Cash-penned "The Man Comes Around" is an epic tale of apocalypse, interpreting Revelations with uplifting exuberance. Restraint, resignation, and a hope of peace pervade the prophetic imagery. Truly, the subdued fury and beauty of this track reduces everything that follows. The immediate question posed is: if this man can still write and perform works of this caliber, why is he resorting to the words and music of others? Ideally, the covers should speak this answer for themselves. Unfortunately, Cash fails to give them voice to do so, and as such, they remain unfortunately silent.

2002-11-07T01:00:03.000-05:00

2002-11-07T01:00:03.000-05:00

Folk/Country

American

November 7, 2002

0398b270-a780-4679-a011-43981a6d3837

Eric Carr

https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/

The restive jazz star, who went on to work with Jack White, Danger Mouse, and others after her multiplatinum debut, returns with a no-frills record that fades into the background without much fuss.

The restive jazz star, who went on to work with Jack White, Danger Mouse, and others after her multiplatinum debut, returns with a no-frills record that fades into the background without much fuss.

Norah Jones: Day Breaks

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22307-day-breaks/

Day Breaks

At this point of her career, it’s easy to forget that Norah Jones was once considered a jazz singer. Back in 2002, long before she worked with Jack White and Brian “Danger Mouse” Burton, Jones released Come Away With Me, an understated gem that went on to sell over 11 million units and earn eight Grammy awards—including Album of the Year and Song of the Year for “Don’t Know Why.” Armed with that voice—a wry, simmering inflection—the Texas native has proven she can sing anything, and sound natural doing so, no matter where the road has taken her. That said, it’s been tough to assess Jones’ creative arc. Feels Like Home, her 2004 sophomore LP, eschewed the traditional jazz of the first record for a folk/country sound. She’s released two honky-tonk country albums as a member of the Little Willies; and in 2012, Jones dropped Little Broken Hearts, a concept record about emotional anguish, set against Danger Mouse’s soulful pop arrangements. Elsewhere, Jones had notable features on Mouse and composer Daniele Luppi’s Rome; with Q-Tip, OutKast and Talib Kweli on their respective albums; and on the Robert Glasper Experiment’s Black Radio 2. Throughout all this, Jones has remained somewhat anonymous, mainly because she’s never appealed to pop and hip-hop consumers. Her music speaks to the adult contemporary crowd, those who actually buy CDs instead of streaming online. Jones has maintained a nice career largely out of the public eye; now 14 years removed from her seminal work, the musician returns to initial form on Day Breaks, her sixth studio album. In a recent interview with the New York Times, Jones said the genesis of the LP can be traced back to a 2014 performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., during a 75th anniversary concert for her label, Blue Note Records. She was performing a cover of songwriter Jesse Harris’ “I’ve Got to See You Again” with iconic saxophonist Wayne Shorter, drummer Brian Blade, and bassist John Patitucci. “When I started thinking about making a ‘jazz record,’ mostly I was thinking about recording with Wayne and Brian,” Jones told the Times. “I didn’t want it to be standards. I was hoping for something very rhythmic, with Wayne floating over the top.” Shorter, Blade, and organist Dr. Lonnie Smith appear throughout Day Breaks, an efficient 12-track set featuring nine original songs and three covers: Horace Silver’s “Peace,” Duke Ellington’s “Fleurette Africaine” and Neil Young’s “Don’t Be Denied.” Day Breaks is especially sparse, a no-frills record that fades into the background without much fuss. It seems to reflect the singer’s personal and professional comfort, that—after 15 years as a signed artist with more than 50 million records sold—Jones doesn’t need to adhere to industry pressures to remain relevant. Whereas some artists revert to their best-received work as a way to reignite past glory, Day Breaks feels like the logical next step for a singer who’s done just about everything there is to do musically. This one isn't a barn-burner, but it's not supposed to be. Unfortunately, though, Day Breaks grows a bit tedious near the middle, and it's easy to forget it's playing if you aren't paying attention. Lyrically, Day Breaks embraces a hazy—if not melancholy—vibe, similar to the Billie Holiday albums Jones listened to as a child. These tracks address some level of perseverance, a pushing through to better days whether romantically or socially. Jones uses a conversational cadence to tell these stories, bolstering the narrative and giving her words better impact. On “Flipside,” a song about racial and civic injustice, Jones and the band sound especially poignant. The other songs slow to a crawl, but this one is hard-charging with a strong message. “If we’re all free, then why does it seem we can’t just be?” Jones asks. “Put the guns away or we’re all gonna lose.” (As of this review, two more unarmed black men—Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma; Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, North Carolina—were shot and killed by police for no reason.) And while Jones didn’t write the lyrics to “Peace”—it is a cover, after all—she effectively owns the message. “Peace,” she hums, “is for everyone.” Sure that’s a noble idea, but we’ve got a long way to go.

2016-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-10-11T01:00:00.000-04:00

Jazz / Pop/R&B

Blue Note

October 11, 2016

039ac104-f145-4b2b-87fb-7d05314eb685

Marcus J. Moore

https://pitchfork.com/staff/marcus-j. moore/

New Pornographers leader Carl Newman's second album follows the cues of his relatively quieter work-- 2004 solo album The Slow Wonder and the Pornographers' overlooked Challengers-- but still helps solidify him as a singular songwriter.

New Pornographers leader Carl Newman's second album follows the cues of his relatively quieter work-- 2004 solo album The Slow Wonder and the Pornographers' overlooked Challengers-- but still helps solidify him as a singular songwriter.

A.C. Newman: Get Guilty

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12590-get-guilty/

Get Guilty

Carl Newman's music, whether with New Pornographers or solo, is typically referred to through the deceptive category of "power pop." But concentrating on simplicity and force alone unfairly deflects attention from the nuance of Newman's approach-- in his lyrics, arrangements, and delivery, there's always much more going on than can be viewed at a distance. Because of the power pop tag, the emergence of Newman's "quieter" side-- best represented by 2004 solo album The Slow Wonder and the Pornographers' overlooked 2007 LP Challengers-- led many to question if, absent the effusive energy, his music was still worthwhile. Wonder's follow-up Get Guilty isn't going to satiate those looking for another Twin Cinema, but it helps solidify the fact-- known to fans for a while now-- that Newman's singularity as a songwriter lies in more than histrionics. Like Wonder, Guilty has its share of up-tempo tracks, yet its real pleasures are idiosyncratic, revealing themselves the more attentively and often you listen. Newman has himself compared (with tongue at least partially in cheek) late-album cut "The Collected Works" to Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls", yet that bit of self-deprecation elides what happens after the first verse, when the bottom drops out of the song, leaving a piano to briefly dialogue with what sounds like a tiny, dying violin. "Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer" is an acoustic rocker with a recognizably whooped-up chorus, but those two titular characters, in Newman's world, are connected by virtue of the fact that they're "all muscle." During the verses of "Elemental", the harmonies of Nicole Atkins (along with Mates of State's Kori Gardner, Guilty's female vocal ringer) provide a subtle, high-register hum behind Newman. Gentle, swirling organs subtly enter the frame to signal that song's slight shift to a refrain, recalling the stately psychedelia of Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom. Like some of Costello's music, much of Guilty feels like a gambit-- a playful way of unsettling expectations with a fun-house mirror approach to musical structure and a fondness for meta-narratives. Newman, like buddy and collaborator Dan Bejar, has always turned his (and our) attention back toward the process of creating (see also: "The Fake Headlines", "Twin Cinema"). The title Get Guilty is a deliberate wink toward postmodern author Donald Barthelme, and "The Palace at 4 AM" is a meta-romantic homage to the act of writing, nestled inside a life-on-the-road tale. On the stately, cascading album-opener "There Are Maybe Ten or Twelve", after singing the song's first lyric, Newman throws us off his path: "That wasn't the opening line, it was the tenth or the twelfth. Make of that what you will." Because he knows how to imbue them with purpose and drive, Newman's narrative fragments and impressionistic lyrics can work just as well without self-reflexivity. On "The Heartbreak Rides", one of his dozen or so best compositions to date, he sings, in his irresistibly nerdy falsetto: "She led the modern sunset to your window, gestured with a plain-Jane hand, she said 'Let's go.'" We don't get a direct sense of what the adventure entails, but the suggestion alone, like the song, is invigorating, like an unplanned road trip or the anxious rush of a romantic relationship. Always his own biggest critic, Newman remembers his youthful capriciousness on the string-flecked, nostalgic "Thunderbolts", singing "We played it too green to start, to play it with any art," as the song pushes toward a crescendo that never comes. Perhaps he's remembering the time when it seemed only natural to substitute verse-chorus-verse with the much more satisfying "chorus-CHORUS-CHORUS!!!" and describe his group as mass romantics and new pornographers. Yet like "Thunderbolts", those ironic descriptors-- suggesting that his music inspired awe by appealing to sensations more than emotions-- indicate Newman's modesty more than they define his art. Revisit his earlier records with an ear toward refinement instead of sheer voltage, and the roots of Get Guilty will clearly reveal themselves amidst the clamor.

2009-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00

2009-01-21T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Matador

January 21, 2009

039ad168-bf2c-4886-a44b-c555adcde1a3

Eric Harvey

https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-harvey/

On his ninth album, the reserved bandleader incorporates more classic rock references than usual, but they’re the frames for subtleties and surprises within.

On his ninth album, the reserved bandleader incorporates more classic rock references than usual, but they’re the frames for subtleties and surprises within.

Cass McCombs: Tip of the Sphere

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/cass-mccombs-tip-of-the-sphere/

Tip of the Sphere

Cass McCombs is open about his tendency to borrow from his predecessors. “I always approach my own music as a listener of other people’s music,” he told Red Bull Music Academy in 2017, several months after the release of his last album, Mangy Love. “My music is a response to the music that I love.” On McCombs’ ninth album, Tip of the Sphere, his hands are more visible than usual as they thumb through a familiar record collection. From the Elton John piano that opens “Absentee” and the pulsing “American Canyon Sutra,” which recalls Lou Reed with its sober spoken-word intonation, to the Haight-Ashbury grooves that echo everywhere, these songs speak through the familiar voices of classic rock. “The Great Pixley Train Robbery” is a story-song worthy of Dylan, “Estrella” an intricate guitar work suggesting Richard Thompson. “Sleeping Volcanoes” could be a great lost Warren Zevon B-side. Because McCombs and his band toy with familiar sounds, even his new songs feel worn and cozy, like winter clothes pulled from storage at the start of December. The blunt references and clear echoes may fool you into thinking this music isn’t somehow original. But McCombs and his band use the obvious as a sort of feint. Through fine details and sudden switchbacks, they reveal hidden layers and twists. “Real Life,” for instance, initially feels like a lovely, lived-in folk jam. But in its last minute, it accelerates, as drums that had kept a dreamy tempo suddenly stir awake and dance, transforming the song into something strange and new and wonderful. While the Elton John piano catches your ear during “Absentee,” Sam Griffin Owens’ sax warbles down in the mix, a class clown whose mischief makes the day’s lesson more fun for everyone, teacher included. Sphere is heavier than Mangy Love, but it doesn’t sport that record’s melodic highs, either. Still, it’s the more rollicking listen, with songs that alternate paces as if driven by some constantly shifting breeze. The interplay between McCombs’ guitar and Dan Horne’s bass on the record’s more upbeat tracks, like “Train Robbery” or “Rounder,” even recalls the energy shared by legendary tandems, like Townshend and Entwistle, say, or Duane Allman and Berry Oakley. (Horne showed this clear chemistry with McCombs during Mangy Love.) McCombs’ voice, too, has become as sharp as any instrument—crystalline and tremoring on “Prayer for Another Day,” and then shifting immediately to low and foreboding on “American Canyon Sutra.” McCombs possesses a rare ability to diffuse improvisation into these sharply arranged songs, allowing for spontaneity during the recording process by disguising it. On “Sidewalk Bop After Suicide,” a rigid guitar-and-drum structure keeps getting nudged out of place by little flourishes. It’s the kind of thing that makes Sphere equally enjoyable whether you’re listening passively or actively; the record doesn’t demand attention but rewards it generously. The same is true for McCombs’ lyrics, which drift from the abstruse (“Rounder,” seemingly influenced by the Scottish ballads the singer loves) to the lucid (“Tying Up Loose Ends,” on which a single verse asking about long-gone relatives makes for the record’s most heartbreaking moment). The sequencing of Tip of the Sphere feels so instinctual that it’s hard to ascribe intention to it, but there’s a clear intelligence at work here. Two long jams, “I Followed the River South to What” and “Rounder,” are the bookends, but they breeze by, as does the rest of the thing. Tip of the Sphere is a confounding trick of time distortion, the shortest hour-long record I’ve ever heard. Familiar McCombs motifs appear: the dubious value of money, the dubious application of justice, reincarnation, what it means to live in nature, to be imprisoned, to be homeless. The turbulence you’d expect to hear in 2019 flashes up, too. “Thank you to the authentic fake/Our true enigmatic uncle/Welcome to coo-coo land!/Home of the fake,” McCombs sings during “Sleeping Volcanoes.” But the record is more moving in its smaller moments. “Tying Up Loose Ends,” the prettiest song here, has one simple verse, in which the narrator finds an old box of family photographs and wonders in vain, “Is there anyone still left who can tell me who all these people are?” Every so often, listeners will refer to McCombs as if he belongs to a simple category—the cagey-interview-giving, mystique-preserving singer enamored with his own enigma, a counterpart of Bradford Cox. But McCombs has never really devoted an excess of energy to his own legend or the way he’s perceived; he likes to talk about his ideas, not himself. As he moves into his fifth decade, the fact that McCombs has never defined himself clearly seems to be working in his favor, making it impossible to see him as familiar, as an old story. Tip of the Sphere again rejects easy definitions and expectations, growing and surprising with every listen.

2019-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

2019-02-09T01:00:00.000-05:00

Folk/Country

Anti-

February 9, 2019

03a0284b-fc64-477e-931b-cc11ae8b0878

Jonah Bromwich

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jonah-bromwich/

Armed only with his acoustic guitar, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy offers stripped-down versions of songs pulled from across his catalog, including songs originally cut with Loose Fur and Golden Smog.

Armed only with his acoustic guitar, Wilco frontman Jeff Tweedy offers stripped-down versions of songs pulled from across his catalog, including songs originally cut with Loose Fur and Golden Smog.

Jeff Tweedy: Together at Last

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/jeff-tweedy-together-at-last/

Together at Last

For Wilco’s entire history, the band’s leader, Jeff Tweedy, has existed as a solo artist. Though the songwriter’s solo recorded output has been limited to the likes of bootlegs and the original score for the 2001 Ethan Hawke film Chelsea Walls, Tweedy alone thrives in a live setting. These shows are the only place where Wilco favorites and deep cuts sit comfortably beside songs from his other projects: alt-country cornerstone Uncle Tupelo, a strum-and-hiss trio with Jim O’Rourke and Glenn Kotche called Loose Fur, the rotating roots-rock collective Golden Smog, or, most recently, his father/son project Tweedy. And the appeal of his solo shows shows goes beyond the music. Tweedy’s curmudgeonly performance presence—from the stage, he discourages clapping along and isn’t afraid to call out those making too much noise—imparts a sense of conversational intimacy. Together at Last celebrates Tweedy’s live solo presence, even if that isn’t the explicit intention. On 11 tracks that focus on his work in Wilco, along with a stray song each from Loose Fur and Golden Smog, the almost exclusively solo acoustic arrangements are similar, if not exactly the same, to the ones he’s been performing in theaters for years. The album is the first in a series recorded at his Chicago studio that will highlight his life as a songwriter, and it revises some of Tweedy’s best moments with mixed results. Summerteeth standout “Via Chicago” and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot opener “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart” are both all-timers, songs that transcend the Wilco songbook and stand worthy of these stripped-down, acoustic retellings. They work because of their contrast to their original recordings, both of which used deconstruction and clutter to maneuver Wilco’s straightforward melodies into more complicated territory, one that evoked transistor radio nostalgia and wistful memories. These production turns would ultimately distinguish Wilco from their alt-country peers, but here we’re reminded of how sturdy the songs are on their own. Deeper YHF cut “Ashes of American Flags” gets a similar treatment, with a spare re-recording to underscore lyrics that look for signs of hope from within moments of bleakness. Tweedy’s claim that he would “die if I could come back new” quivers with years of reflection, the song flowing with a new life. Together at Last has only two non-Wilco tracks, but they illustrate what the set does best. “Laminated Cat” exists in a few different forms, including both the fuzzed-out YHF outtake “Not for the Season” and the Loose Fur version that infuses Tweedy’s straight-ahead pop sensibility with the hisses and squeals of his collaborators. But here, the bare-bones arrangement highlights the song’s calendar-flipping poetry, accentuating each verse’s sense of seasonal discomfort at the uncontrollable passing of time. Golden Smog’s “Lost Love” is an even a deeper dig, anchored by a wide-eyed sentiment that doesn’t try to be more than a direct love song. “Broken hearts all around me, but I don’t feel a thing,” Tweedy sings, lacking the cracked-skin weariness present on many of these new recordings, and thus honoring the youthful conceit of temporary romance that he wrote about 20 years earlier. This is Tweedy as excavator, rescuing a pair of gems that have been hidden in obscurity and offering them a fresh chance at appreciation. Just as often, though, Together at Last lacks a sense of purpose. “Dawned on Me” and “I’m Always in Love” show how much the upbeat originals rely on production for their full impact. As acoustic renditions, they offer little more than skeletons of their former selves. “Hummingbird” fares even worse, with Tweedy, possibly unable to hit the song’s falsetto climax, whistling in place of a full-band coda. In a live setting, he’d be able to crack a joke about this affectation and move on from the moment, but on record, the song just hangs there, crying out for a little levity. With his wry charm absent, the album ultimately shows only a partial picture of Jeff Tweedy as a solo artist.

2017-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-06-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

dBpm

June 27, 2017

03a6cd38-d782-410a-9612-9222656ca583

Philip Cosores

https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-cosores/

On Why Do the Heathen Rage?, Matmos member Drew Daniel's third album of propulsive electronica under the occasional name the Soft Pink Truth, taunts perhaps the most reactive, boundary-buttressing subgenre of them all: black metal.

On Why Do the Heathen Rage?, Matmos member Drew Daniel's third album of propulsive electronica under the occasional name the Soft Pink Truth, taunts perhaps the most reactive, boundary-buttressing subgenre of them all: black metal.

The Soft Pink Truth: Why Do the Heathen Rage?

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19454-the-soft-pink-truth-why-do-the-heathen-rage/

Why Do the Heathen Rage?

Drew Daniel must have armadillo-thick skin—or, a closet crowded with functional chainmail. On Why Do the Heathen Rage?, his third album of propulsive electronica under the occasional name the Soft Pink Truth, the Matmos member taunts perhaps the most reactive, boundary-buttressing subgenre of them all: black metal, a historic domain of hate crimes, real blood, ideological belligerence and institutionalized aggression. Daniel—a gay electronic producer who moved from San Francisco to Baltimore in 2007—recruited a cast of indie rock pals and heavy metallurgists to cover 10 black metal songs, with relative standards from Mayhem, Darkthrone, and Sarcofago accompanying a sample of more obscure sides. But guitars appear exactly one time here, blood-curdling tirades maybe three. Instead, Daniel and his collaborators turn these tirades about fucking and killing, desecrating and dying into dance-floor and pop-chart bait, with bludgeoning house tempos, mesmerizing hooks and prismatic synths. Why Do the Heathen Rage? is Daniel’s open invitation to name-calling, a plea to be branded with poser status and homosexual slurs from a scene that’s often been happy to oblige. It’s perhaps the ultimate black metal troll, an album meant to make the truest kvlt heathens, well, rage. The rest of us can simply move. The Soft Pink Truth began as a sort of dare for Daniel from the producer Matthew Herbert, who challenged the experimentalist to make a house record. Likewise, Why Do the Heathen Rage?, the project’s first output in a decade, began as Daniel’s dare for himself after DJing at Rainbow in the Dark, a monthly “party for gay men, satanists and metal enthusiasts.” Could he pair one obsession with another? Could he take the misanthropic might of black metal and tie it to the communal ecstasy of techno? Could a song like Mayhem’s existentially doomed “Buried by Time and Dust” be rewired for the club? Absolutely. In Matmos, Daniel has used electronic music to explore audacious concepts, whether that’s meant building a record from samples of surgical procedures to an album-length, detail-laced tribute to the duo’s heroes. Why Do the Heathen Rage? takes a similar tack, funneling far-flung resources into one intimidating concept. These risky reassessments come loaded with guests uniformly and uniquely suited to the challenge. In the prelude, for instance, Antony Hegarty trades lines of a poem about mysticism, androgyny and witchcraft with Daniel. The gossamer ease of the former sits like a specter against the pitch-shifted, Lucifer-deep growl of the latter. That juxtaposition sets the stage for a play between shades of pink and black, a tension that the album—the whole project, really—mines. “Satanic Black Devotion” calls on both guitarist Owen Gaertner, who toiled through transcriptions of all of these songs for Daniel, and Locrian’s Terrence Hannum, a nominal “metal guy” with a particularly broad view of what that might mean. In four minutes, the cover pinballs between Gaertner’s solemn electric guitar and Daniel’s drum machine punishment, Daniel’s ghoulish chants and Hannum’s pained screams. An “I’ve Got the Power” sample precedes an atmospheric fade into pastel noise. The trio finds its own path through the melodrama of the Sargeist original but leaves room to point out that its self-serious malevolence is worthy of at least one laugh. Solo black metal dudes always have the power. For similar reasons, Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner emerges as the unexpected star of Why Do the Heathen Rage?. Along with Daniel himself, she serves as the paragon of respecting the source material while repurposing it at will, too. In its original form, “Let There Be Ebola Frost” is a rote, mid-tempo march from Finland’s short-lived AN. Its lunging riff and lacerated vocals mostly obscure the extreme essence at the song’s core, as though the band were too shy to confess to their own apocalyptic vision of a “realm of flushed blood.” But Wassner commands this script, delivering worldwide extermination orders without a hint of irony or innocence. “Feel it bleed so quick,” she coos in a moment of graceful comedown, Daniel emptying the beat into a bed of graceful synthesizer sighs. “I don’t feel any kind of compunction.” She summons a sort of schoolyard song at the end, turning a partial acrostic about annihilation into a cheerleading chant. Her turn on Sarcofago’s “Ready to Fuck” turns the fellatio demands of a dude named Antichrist into a subversively demure seduction, full of starts and stops and squeals and background moans from both Wassner and a tamed demon played by Daniel. The take accomplishes what Sarcofago ultimately sought—that is, sex, or the suggestion of it—but reshapes the message by switching the sender. At such moments, it’s tempting to praise Why Do the Heathen Rage? as an expert, unapologetic sendup of black metal, a massive fuck you to a caste that’s said exactly that to so many others as a matter of stylistic necessity. The cover even depicts dudes in corpsepaint running trains on one another and skinheads getting handjobs from longhairs who wield knives and spike bracelets. And the record ends, too, with a wild-eyed and reckless race through “Grim and Frostbitten Gay Bar,” a cut from the most obscure act included here—Impaled Northern Moonforest, the hyperbolic and hilarious black metal parody launched and dropped by members of Anal Cunt more than a decade ago. In spirit and sound, it’s the most allegiant cover here, a confirmation of a delirious mockery. The killer, one might surmise, has been killed. That’s too simple for black metal, though, and too simple for techno. Most of all, it’s too reductive for Daniel, an artist whose previous output doesn’t necessarily reflect his pedigree as a fan, a writer, a thinker and a person. (One doesn’t really stumble across AN without a rather serious investment in this stuff.) “It’s about a contradiction or about a double citizenship that I have as somebody that’s a gay dude who’s heard a lot of dance music in gay bars and… loves a lot of sounds, a lot of imagery and a lot of ideas that are totally contemptuous of the ethos of dance floor music,” he told Steel for Brains. He’s not out to destroy black metal so much as to reconsider the source of its unrepentant attitude and redirect it into another form with equal gusto. He’s strip-mined one thing he loves in order to drive another. In doing so, he’s found a wonderful, unexpected kind of combustion. Yes, that will get him called names, and yes, that will make some faithful truly rage on message boards and (anonymously) in comment threads. But in 1982, above the belligerent stomp of “Black Metal,” Venom’s Cronos sang of “taking our chances with raw energy,” setting at least one cornerstone for the movement that followed. Daniel begins Why Do the Heathen Rage? with a trunk-rattling version of that anthem, launching his own take on black metal primacy by co-opting one of its founding documents. He swaps guitar solos for breakbeats and turns the chorus into an ecstatic, industrial chant. It’s meant to be shouted out with eyes closed and fists up—you know, real, metal power.

2014-06-20T02:00:01.000-04:00

2014-06-20T02:00:01.000-04:00

Electronic

Thrill Jockey

June 20, 2014

03abacf1-4c18-4ae6-aa86-7bb4d80a1f64

Grayson Haver Currin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/

Newly expanded with three complete concerts, this 1978 double live album captured the elastic, elusive charms of Little Feat and proved foundational for jam bands to come.

Newly expanded with three complete concerts, this 1978 double live album captured the elastic, elusive charms of Little Feat and proved foundational for jam bands to come.

Little Feat: Waiting for Columbus (Super Deluxe Edition)

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/little-feat-waiting-for-columbus-super-deluxe-edition/

Waiting for Columbus (Super Deluxe Edition)

During their heyday in the mid-1970s, Little Feat had the reputation of being your favorite band's favorite band. Other groups sold more records and tickets, but Little Feat cultivated a deep, passionate cult through their funky concoctions of New Orleans soul, California country-rock, and urban blues, a blend that was plenty appealing on record but found its natural home onstage. Little Feat were aware of the chasm between their studio sets and concerts, so they aimed to channel that kinetic energy onto Waiting for Columbus, the 1978 double live album that’s now been expanded into an eight-CD box set with three complete concerts that provided the source for the original LP. Like many double-live sets of the era, this was the album that crystallized the band’s appeal, capturing the elastic, elusive charms of a group that wandered on the fringes of rock counterculture since the late ’60s. Lowell George, a shaggy hippie with prodigious appetites, formed the band after leaving the Mothers of Invention. Legend has it that Frank Zappa kicked out George after hearing the guitarist’s original composition “Willin’,” a country-rock ballad for dopers. George called up Bill Payne, a keyboardist who didn’t pass an audition for Zappa, then roped in his old Factory bandmate drummer Richie Hayward, and invited ex-Mother bassist Roy Estrada into his new band, who alternated heavy, surrealistic blues with stoned country-rock. After delivering two superb albums in this vein, Little Feat regrouped, swapping Kenny Gradney for Roy Estrada while bringing in percussionist Sam Clayton and guitarist Paul Barrere, players that helped lead the band in a funkier direction on 1973’s Dixie Chicken and beyond. Little Feat found their footing on 1974’s Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, a record made after the group relocated from Los Angeles to the Washington D.C. area. They started playing college towns up and down the east coast, developing into a ferocious rock’n’roll band with the dexterity of jazz musicians. They were kindred spirits with the Grateful Dead—George wound up producing the Dead’s 1978 LP Shakedown Street—but their rhythms hit harder and the band was tighter, qualities that helped Little Feat become a simmering cult sensation. They reached a boiling point on January 19, 1975, when they played a Warner Bros. package tour at London's Rainbow Theatre, blowing headliners the Doobie Brothers off the stage with an unusually fiery set. Soon, the UK embraced Little Feat—and that includes British rock royalty: Jimmy Page sang their praises, while Clayton remembers, "One time, the Stones picked us up at the airport on the runway. We didn't even have to go through customs." All the accolades didn’t translate into blockbuster sales in the United States. Little Feat managed to eke out respectable chart positions with Feats Don’t Fail Me Now and its successor, 1975’s The Last Record Album, whose title alone suggests how precarious their fate seemed. George started to drift away from the band during the recording of Time Loves a Hero, a 1977 record where Payne and Barrere nudged their music toward jazz, an inclination that came to a head on “Day at the Dog Races,” a winding instrumental that divided the band; upon hearing it, George groused “What is this, fuckin’ Weather Report?” George rekindled his interest in Little Feat with the idea of a live album. The group decided to record shows at their hometown Lisner Auditorium in D.C. and return to the Rainbow, the site of their London triumph in 1975, adding a few warm up gigs in Newcastle and Manchester for good measure. Culling highlights from the Rainbow and Lisner gigs, Waiting for Columbus presented the platonic ideal of a Little Feat record: two LPs of prime loose-limbed funk, blues boogie, and jazz odysseys. Cut while they were plugging Time Loves a Hero, the tracklist prioritizes funky fusion over the stoner humor and hard-bitten blues of their first two records yet those elements are still present in the open-ended reworking of “Sailin’ Shoes” and the heavy stomp of “A Apolitical Blues.” When the group slides into “Old Folks Boogie,” it’s also possible to hear the origins of the middle-aged groove merchants Little Feat would become once they reunited nearly a decade after Lowell George’s 1979 death. When this shuffle is surrounded by funny, road-beaten rockers from Dixie Chicken and Feats Don’t Fail Me Now, it adds up to a complete portrait of everything Little Feat could do. As much as the Grateful Dead’s interstellar explorations, Waiting for Columbus is a urtext of jam bands, a joyous celebration of grooves and textures born of the group's idiosyncratic chemistry. Much of that chemistry is an illusion. Waiting for Columbus was heavily tweaked in the studio, with George supplying vocal and guitar overdubs over the course of three weeks. The ambling sets were sculpted into four smooth sides, skillfully balancing George’s tunes with those of Payne and Barrere. Engineer Warren Dewey set up mics in a hallway to capture the band’s pre-show huddle where they harmonized on “Join the Band,” a spiritual George and Payne discovered on a Smithsonian folk collection, so that snippet serves as a fanfare for the good times to come. These little editing tricks are put into sharp relief on the new Super Deluxe Edition, which includes a full Manchester warmup date, a night at the Rainbow, and one at Lisner. Superficially, these concerts don’t offer much in the way of surprises. Little Feat didn’t expand when they jammed—they dug deep, burrowing into the recesses of a groove to give it life and color. When they extend “Dixie Chicken” to 14 minutes, it’s a way to ride a wave, not to head into the unknown. Throughout these shows, Little Feat play with varying levels of intensity: In Manchester, they are a bit loose, while they’re focused and driven at the Rainbow and invigorated by the hometown crowd in D.C. These may be subtle differences but they are notable, as are the variations between these unvarnished live tapes and the finished album. Some of that amounts to the rough vagaries of live performance, whether it’s garbled lead vocals on a spectacularly funky “All That You Dream” from D.C. or George attempting to explain guacamole to a London audience during a fevered “Tripe Face Boogie.” On the whole, the performances are hotter than the finished LP, yet the shows also hint at the schism in the band by making space for fusion, both in the form of the jazzy “Red Streamliner” and long, long readings of “Day at the Dog Races” where Little Feat does sound like a streamlined Weather Report. Heard on their own, each concert is thoroughly enjoyable, but an unexpected bonus is how they collectively accentuate the marvel of the original version of Waiting for Columbus. Far from diluting the experience of live Little Feat, the studio polish on the 1978 LP offers a heightened reality of the band, one where the bandmates are perfectly aligned, never leaning too hard on any one of their inspirations, never proceeding too far down one detour: They’re just rolling right through the night in a state of bliss.

2022-08-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

2022-08-02T00:01:00.000-04:00

Rock

Rhino

August 2, 2022

03ad07f3-4446-4772-95d0-868a3c36dc7d

Stephen Thomas Erlewine

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-thomas erlewine/

After several years digging into hushed oddities and esoteric songwriting systems, Ben Chasny resurfaces with his most immediate batch of songs yet.

After several years digging into hushed oddities and esoteric songwriting systems, Ben Chasny resurfaces with his most immediate batch of songs yet.

Six Organs of Admittance: Companion Rises

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/six-organs-of-admittance-companion-rises/

Companion Rises

Despite his career tenure in the reductive order of “freak-folk,” Ben Chasny has never been easy to track. For nearly a quarter-century as Six Organs of Admittance, Chasny—perhaps the most consistently exploratory figure in what was once dubbed New Weird America—has moved in fits, starts, and left turns. He has been a high-flying guitarist and a hypnotic singer-songwriter, a curdled noise enthusiast and an aspiring poet. And just when he seemed to settle, Chasny developed his own system of speculative music, Hexadic, in which a deck of cards prompted the notes he played for a pair of challenging 2015 albums. And then, of course, he pivoted to his most serene music ever. Companion Rises offers a few more unforeseen forks in this riverine path. Chasny has earned a reputation as an ardent collaborator, but he wrote, recorded, and played everything here alone. What’s more, he generated many of these rhythms—and there are lots of them, layered like intricate strata of ancient stones—with computer programs he designed. That sounds complicated, but Six Organs have actually never made an album that maintains such momentum or delivers so many compulsive hooks at once. “I don’t know what kind of music it is,” Chasny wrote while mixing Companion Rises last summer. After all this time, it’s music that suggests wholesale new frontiers for what Six Organs might become. A keen melody or stunning detail anchors every song on Companion Rises. The title track—a tender astrological ballad, where synthesizer rays suggest the rising or setting sun—is one of the most beautiful, disarming songs Chasny’s ever recorded. “The 101,” meanwhile, reimagines the Six Organs aesthetic of muttered vocals and byzantine guitars as garage rock, as though Chasny suddenly stepped into the Fun House. Electrifying and jarring, the song and its jagged solo drag Chasny back toward the psych-rock roar of Comets on Fire, a band he left a dozen years ago. It’s thrilling to witness. Whenever Chasny burrows inside some particularly contemplative tune, he eventually claws back toward the light. When his cooing voice finally lifts over the fluorescent electronic washes of “Black Tea,” it’s like watching clouds break. “Haunted and Known” drifts through three minutes of acoustic guitar and fragile falsetto before squelching electronics start to roar, ultimately overpowering everything. What’s most remarkable about Companion Rises, though, is a trio of songs—“Two Forms Moving,” “The Scout Is Here,” and “Mark Yourself”—that suggest a new future for Six Organs. Chasny has often favored meticulous arrangements, where each sound gets its own distinct space; these songs could get tedious, mazelike. But on these songs, Chasny wedges the flotsam of brittle guitars and the jetsam of distorted electronics closely together, shaping a warped sort of composite folk-pop. It recalls the most essential work of Califone, a band at their best when building something new by mining the junkyard of American folk. Chasny has rarely sounded so tuneful or focused. In recent years, following Chasny has meant diving with him into esoterica, where the animating ideas for a piece of music, from the Tarot to the desert, could feel more important than the songs themselves. The results were fascinating, if vexing. Based on theories about aliens, astronomy, and the occult, the writing on Companion Rises is still thematically obscure. But, at least temporarily, Chasny has resurfaced in search of a more immediate connection, letting heavy notions push his songs upward rather than drag them apart. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-02-28T01:00:00.000-05:00

Experimental

Drag City

February 28, 2020

03aebc45-1f9a-4273-bfad-3f162e770466

Grayson Haver Currin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/

Collecting a year's worth of heady dance singles plus two unreleased tracks, Pink suggests Four Tet is capable of going deeper and expanding higher than almost anyone else out there.

Collecting a year's worth of heady dance singles plus two unreleased tracks, Pink suggests Four Tet is capable of going deeper and expanding higher than almost anyone else out there.

Four Tet: Pink

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/17093-pink/

Pink

In March of last year, Four Tet's sole proprietor Kieran Hebden dusted off his Text Records imprint. Originally started in 2001, it had only released eight titles over the course of a decade, but 2011 would prove to be a busy year for Hebden. Rather than rest on the laurels and accolades for 2010's There Is Love in You, he released his entry in the acclaimed Fabriclive series, toured and DJed internationally, and then jumpstarted Text with two plain sleeve 12"'s: "Ego"/"Mirror" was a Four Tet collaboration with dubstep demiurge Burial and some British bloke named Thom Yorke and "Pinnacles"/"Ye Ye" was a split single featuring Four Tet and Caribou's Dan Snaith (before he assumed his Daphni moniker). The former signified a decade's worth of British electronic music--running from Kid A through Four Tet and onto Burial-- while Four Tet's "Pinnacles" served a function similar to his 2008 EP Ringer. After the loft jazz-inspired Everything Ecstatic and a heady collaboration with noted jazz/soul/African/funk drummer Steve Reid that resulted in numerous drum-laptop improv albums and suggested that Hebden might never quite return to earth, Ringer reminded fans that Hebden has always kept an ear to the dancefloor. But whereas that EP reveled in 4/4 minimal-yet-playful techno bangers, "Pinnacles" was a decidedly more ambitious affair, intermingling dubstep's wobble with an elegant McCoy Tyner-esque piano line, Joe Meek guitar lick, and some lasers. Perhaps spurred by the "Thom Yorke Bump," it triggered a year's worth of heady dance singles from Hebden, spanning three 12"'s (with another credited to the moniker Percussions), all compiled now on Pink with an additional two unreleased tracks. "Locked" opens things and hearkens back to the Four Tet of old. A dusty, crackling drum break that would make b-boys bob heads lopes around, but it soon abuts another machine pulse, suggesting an African polyrhythm about its downtempo pace. It's from this trickier rhythmic bed (with a substrata of bass frequencies) that Hebden builds up a wistful melody that evokes memories of his 2003 breakout album, Rounds. The unreleased "Lion" follows, suggesting both the earliest instances of late-80s tribal house as well as au courant UK bass music, the primitive yips, clipped kalimba line and speedy metabolism of the snare underpinned by a menacing drone. When the "Jupiters" single dropped earlier this year, I was a tad underwhelmed as the overture-- while stately and lovely-- seemed to do little for the side. Yet it works better in the context of Pink, providing a beatless interlude before dropping us into Four Tet's most bass-heavy and adventurous track to date, nodding to Autechre at their crunchiest and 2-step at its twitchiest. It's followed by its standout flipside, "Ocoras", wherein Hebden takes what could be a skipping CD of organ music and some of Pantha du Prince's struck-bell tones and minces them finely before sprinkling atop some propulsive minimal techno. A skittering hi-hat rather than harps power "128 Harps" and again evokes the "idyllictronica" tag once affixed to Four Tet's particular strain of electronic music. "Pyramid", originally the B-side for "Locked", has a Model 500-worthy bassline and Hebden again deploys a voice (uttering "I remember how you walked away") in much the same manner as he did on "Love Cry". Those components alone would make this a standout track, but he again pushes at such parameters and at around the four minute mark, a shimmering metallophone melody worthy of Steve Reich arises and provides a break: not in the sense of unadorned drums building up tension for release, but like a sun through clouds. And while Pink should not be conflated with a proper follow-up to There Is Love in You, even as a singles comp it suggests that the undergrad producer circa Rounds is now post-doctorate, and Four Tet is capable of going deeper and expanding higher than almost anyone else out there.

2012-08-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-08-29T02:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

Text

August 29, 2012

03b0f447-f020-43f0-be11-135d30f46058

Andy Beta

https://pitchfork.com/staff/andy-beta/

Billy Corgan's 1990s hot streak was fueled by self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, the equal and opposite manifestations of a whopping ego. The reissue of the Smashing Pumpkins' 1994 odd-and-ends collection showcases his ability to write colossal electric odysseys and wispy love songs.

Billy Corgan's 1990s hot streak was fueled by self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, the equal and opposite manifestations of a whopping ego. The reissue of the Smashing Pumpkins' 1994 odd-and-ends collection showcases his ability to write colossal electric odysseys and wispy love songs.

The Smashing Pumpkins: Pisces Iscariot

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16929-pisces-iscariot/

Pisces Iscariot

I barely recall having two nickels to rub together at any given time in the 1990s, but between studio albums, video collections, B-side compilations, t-shirts, live bootlegs, and guitar tablature books (even Adore!), I estimate that the Smashing Pumpkins separated me from about $400. And not once did I feel like I was being taken advantage of. Billy Corgan: That guy knew how to give. Obviously, his willingness to personally pen his own liner notes, skewer his poor lil' rich boy image at Hullabalooza, author a column in Guitar World to teach you how to get the right tone for "Geek U.S.A." and lick shots at Steve Lukather weren't entirely altruistic. Corgan's tremendous artistic hot streak was fueled by self-loathing and self-aggrandizement, the equal and opposite manifestations of a whopping ego. But what other multi-platinum rock star was doing this kind of thing back then? Smashing Pumpkins' reissues have been certainly generous so far, and Pisces Iscariot is no exception. However, Pisces Iscariot was generous to begin with, a stopgap between Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness that was described by Corgan as his attempt to make a mixtape instead of an album. That's pretty much bullshit. He obviously comes from a background that worships the LP form, and Pisces Iscariot is painstakingly sequenced to maintain a concept record's sonic peaks and valleys, favoring stylistic cohesion over protracted diversity. Its ratio of sweet acoustic strummers, barnstorming riff-rockers, and expansive guitar freakouts is balanced almost exactly akin to that of Siamese Dream or Gish. It still works as an album if you want it to, meaning it's not exactly Incesticide or Masterplan as far as alt-rock cash-ins go. This is a compliment Corgan would probably take as a tremendous validation. In fact, the only concrete way to differentiate this from a typical Smashing Pumpkins album without Corgan's designation are the cover songs, and what's interesting is how uninteresting the selections are. Corgan would align himself with the likes of Queen, Boston, and Black Sabbath as something of a preemptive strike; bands who sold a ton of records and were often reviled for having the wrong kind of ambitions. But on the deluxe version of Pisces Iscariot, you can find live covers of the Velvet Underground's "Venus in Furs" and Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl", both of which are basically "Livin' on a Prayer" in Canon Karaoke. The two that made Pisces proper definitely earned their place, though. Who knows what inspiration Corgan took from the beer-barrel-chested belting of Eric Burdon, but their version of the Animals' "A Girl Named Sandoz" is loose and fun, a rare instance where you might imagine Smashing Pumpkins as four people who legitimately enjoyed making music together. More crucial is "Landslide", which works largely because Corgan doesn't go out of his way to make it his*.* There are no kettle drums, no weeping strings, just a nylon acoustic, a single overdub for the solo, and one of his most sympathetic and tender vocal performances. It's not a hard song to pull off, but this version verges on definitive. And as these things generally worked out at the height of the music industry boom, it allowed Smashing Pumpkins' so-called "mixtape" to go gold and peak at No. 4 on the Billboard chart. "Landslide" assured the band some career momentum, and it's also the key to understanding what Pisces says about the Smashing Pumpkins in 1994. Corgan may not have been better at making wispy, acoustic love songs than he was at colossal electric odysseys at the time, but it's a side that had been underdeveloped. Siamese Dream had its soft side, obviously, but those songs befitted a heavy, heavy record-- "Disarm", "Spaceboy", and even "Luna" dripped with pathos and Mellotron strings. Conversely, Pisces' delicate bookends, "Soothe" and "Spaced", are every bit what their titles suggest, disarming you with fumbled acoustic picking and found sound (according to the liner notes, you can hear the cars outside Corgan's apartment go by on the former). Meanwhile, "Obscured" and "Whir" are two of Corgan's most gorgeous songs, period. The chord progressions are almost incapacitating in their beauty, supplemented by gauzy vocals, brushed drumming, and harmonic feedback touched by an early-morning vulnerability that the Pumpkins would never achieve again, not even on Adore. It was perhaps the one mode in which James Iha could reasonably compete with Corgan, and his contribution, "Blew Away", is indicative of the more country-ish lean of his solo albums. Had Smashing Pumpkins' albums not been such massive undertakings, it would have been interesting to hear what an LP of true-blue love songs might have accomplished. The lighter touch has a varied effect on Pisces' rock tracks. Many of them are top-shelf: The 11-minute "Starla" is the moonier, flower-child kin of "Silverfuck", and "Hello Kitty Kat" and "Frail & Bedazzled" are groove-heavy glam-rock. While there's no shame in saying nothing here could dislodge a track from Siamese Dream-- one of the best records of its time-- the question is, why are these B-sides? Part of it is tautological. They don't generate the same heft as "Quiet" or "Rocket" because they lack the associative power of being on the actual records. You get an idea of what separates an album cut from a B-side with songs like "Plume" and "Pissant". Corgan has a weakness for this kind of thing-- lyrically regressive ("talk revolution as if it matters now," "my boredom has outshone the sun"), musically blunt, and presented in a relatively "raw" fashion. But it mostly shows him to be completely unconvincing as a punk or a burnout. For the Smashing Pumpkins, conviction is equivalent to effort, and although Corgan lived to boast of hand-manipulating tape flange and backmasking spoken-word samples, his overcompensation in the studio wasn't about bolstering weak songs. Rather, it was all about bolstering the idea that You, Alienated Teen Listener, shared Corgan's pervasive sense of persecution and that those guitar armies and forthright moping orders provided the necessary ammunition to battle a world that was rigged against you. Nothing on Pisces Iscariot is a dud, but since Corgan puts "mixtape" below the level of "album," you sense he knew something we didn't about "Blue" or "Plume". Perhaps he determined a structural deficiency rendering them incapable of enduring the overdubbing rigor that spawned the thematically similar but exponentially mightier "Bodies", "Fuck You (An Ode to No One)", or, obviously, "Bullet With Butterfly Wings". Because really, Smashing Pumpkins songs were larger than life and Billy Corgan was not. And he knows it. And the years burn. He never conveyed the political or ethical gravitas of Bono or Eddie Vedder, never was as beautiful and doomed as Kurt Cobain, never stood for musical and technological progress like Thom Yorke. And even if the derision he earned in indie rock was based on outmoded ideals of authenticity, the hatred was real. Still, even as his first and most intense fans get to rewrite the history of the 90s, Corgan gets left out of the critical pantheon. The music of Pisces Iscariot won't change that, even though it's something close to essential for any self-identifying Pumpkins fan (to these ears, it's more distinctive, sonically diverse, and consistent than the beloved but ultimately threadbare Gish.) But even if most of his musical values are and were derided for celebrating 70s prog/pomp excess, Pisces Iscariot is proof that Corgan might actually be more progressive than he lets on. When you look at how Billy Corgan used the Smashing Pumpkins to interact with the public at the time-- treating liner notes as an exchange between pen pals, doing odd press of his own volition, making "mixtapes" that fused curation with composition-- these are all things that feel awfully commonplace now. Is it any wonder his general attitude nowadays is "no good deed goes unpunished?"

2012-07-19T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-07-19T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

EMI

July 19, 2012

03b6aca4-74c8-419b-bb49-55d972149089

Ian Cohen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/

Over a well-played hand of wistful, bright-eyed, and reflective beats, HNDRXX strikes a near-perfect balance between a man still licking his wounds and a man emerging from a long, dark night.

Over a well-played hand of wistful, bright-eyed, and reflective beats, HNDRXX strikes a near-perfect balance between a man still licking his wounds and a man emerging from a long, dark night.

Future: HNDRXX

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22978-hndrxx/

HNDRXX

Future has become the antihero for men who believe emotional torture is essential to masculinity. After a splashy, very public relationship with the singer Ciara, the two had a splashy, very public breakup that spilled from the courts and onto Twitter. In its wake, Future measured his pain into cups of codeine-spiked soda and poured it all over his music, most notably on 2015’s Dirty Sprite 2. Dudes who lived vicariously through him dredged up all sorts of relationship trauma in order to wail alongside him, once more with feeling. After DS2’s 4 a.m. drive through the desert, Future cartwheeling back into the heart-clutching love songs and sweet-street persona of his 2012 debut, Pluto, might have been jarring. But nobody stays in beast mode forever, and FUTURE, the companion piece to HNDRXX, showed a few cracks in his hardened facade. Heartbreaks heal, especially when you’re a Romeo rapper with an R&B bedside manner and an unending supply of Vicodin. Over a well-played hand of wistful, bright-eyed and reflective beats, HNDRXX strikes a near-perfect balance between a man still licking his wounds and a man emerging from a long, dark night. That’s not to say there isn’t a little bumpiness upon re-entry. For all of us who missed the old Future—that “Turn on the Lights” Future, that love-you-down-in-the-sheets and buy-you-a-new-Range-for-the-streets Future—HNDRXX’s opener “My Collection” is a bit of a mind fuck. Over a wispy lullaby of a beat that sounds like more like an outro than an intro, Future peels off bills before asking, “You wanna come to Pluto?” Yes! Unfortunately, he lapses into light shaming of Ciara’s sexual history before the cringe-worthy declaration, “Even if I hit you once, you part of my collection.” A trio of standard-issue songs follows, filled with flossy verses flush with cash, cars, designer namedrops and a couple funny lines (“I wanna take you out to Paris and buy you better clothes,” he says in “Lookin Exotic”; “Baby mama back drinking liquor/Now she tryin’ to fuck my life up” in the DJ Mustard-produced “Damage”). The Weeknd’s sniveling on “Comin Out Strong” aside, these all blur together. But redemption comes on the ghostly “Use Me.” One of Future’s gifts is imbuing his voice with such emotion that lyrics become putty in his hands. As shadows flit across the wall, the plaintive refrain of “use me” is made all the more gut-wrenching when he belts it. By the time an organ warbles onto the song, he’s spent, his heart wrung dry. The shivery chorus begins to fade, and birds start chirping. It’s chilly, but dawn has finally broken, and somebody's cooking Nayvadius breakfast this morning. “Incredible” and “Testify” are sun-warmed island beats that smell and shimmer like tanning oil-slicked shoulders. Future sounds like he’s on vacation, loose as his limbs after that hot yoga class. “I was havin’ trust issues/But I’ve been havin’ way better luck since you,” he starts off “Incredible,” relieved to baby talk again instead of bragging about another random bad bitch. Plenty of lines on HNDRXX  melt hearts and make up for all games and the lies: “I wanna hear your heart pump pound for pound …We conversin’ back and forth like we real partners/Spiritually we bonded through the turmoil.” If that’s not enough, he comes bearing a gentle pop duet with Rihanna, “Selfish” (featuring delicate production from Detail, Major Seven, and Mantra), and a seven-and-a-half minute apology, “Sorry.” He’s still airing out grievances and self-medicating with a fistful of ‘scripts, but the run from “Use Me” to “I Thank U” is inspired. The sun burns the edges of the clouds without entirely breaking through, which feels more honest, anyway. The old cliché is that artists produce better work when they're in pain, and it did seem like the deeper Future sank, the higher his star rose. Appreciating that without romanticizing or wallowing in his despair is key, as is allowing him freedom to create from a different emotional vantage point. As Charles Bukowski wrote in “Let It Enfold You”: “Either peace or happiness,/Let it enfold you/When I was a young man/I felt these things were/Dumb, unsophisticated.” But Bukowski got that first part wrong. Peace and happiness do not simply “enfold” you. Sadness spreads like weeds, and channeling that into your music is a means of purging it so it won’t choke you. It’s joy that requires constant tending to grow. With HNDRXX, Future did just that, venturing back into the day for some fresh air with his woman who’s frying bacon. The sand’s like flour between their toes, and the music feels just fine.

2017-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-03-03T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Epic

March 3, 2017

03b6dce2-04ed-4eff-b237-2f0f531f3fee

Rebecca Haithcoat

https://pitchfork.com/staff/rebecca- haithcoat/

The Brooklyn band has described this four-song release as "an EP in length, but well beyond that in scope." If Hospice and Burst Apart were dark, rolling hills headed towards catharsis, here's the bottom.

The Brooklyn band has described this four-song release as "an EP in length, but well beyond that in scope." If Hospice and Burst Apart were dark, rolling hills headed towards catharsis, here's the bottom.

The Antlers: Undersea

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16860-undersea/

Undersea

Turmoil is in Peter Silberman's DNA. Leading up to the release of 2011's Burst Apart, the frontman for Brooklyn soundscape-rockers the Antlers told Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal that his band's fourth LP would be less emotionally wrenching than the previous record that put them on the map, 2009's Hospice. "This is not a sad record... It does have an emotional punch, but it's a little less desperate. There are no life or death situations on this record, no terminal illness, no abusive relationships." How'd that turn out, anyway? Well, Burst Apart's opening song is called "I Don't Want Love", and its closing song compares a relationship to a dead dog. Lovers are shunned, teeth fall out, hopelessness is conveyed throughout, and at one point the protagonist seemingly (and willingly) lets a house fire engulf him and whoever else there is inside. Maybe he was joking. To be fair: While Burst Apart contained its fair share of emotional evisceration, the stakes did seem somewhat lower, or at least less immediately life-shaking. As a lyricist, words have rarely failed Silberman (see: the literate hospitalization-as-cohabitation narrative storytelling of Hospice), but with time he's developed a sense of linguistic economy, which has in turn made the displayed imagery more cryptic and threatening. Perhaps not coincidentally, as the word count decreased, the Antlers zoomed past the early specter of a Funeral Jr. albatross and evolved into something much more interesting: a warm, expansive, and at times hair-raising space-rock band with its attention turned toward fleshy matters, rather than the stars above. There were hints of this potential to be found in Hospice-- big booming stretches of ambient guitar wash and tape-decayed vocals-- but that record's emotional, singularly focused claustrophobia was so intense and choking that when Sharon Van Etten showed up near the end of the trippy, strung-out "Thirteen", it felt like an intrusion. Burst Apart was all widescreen-lens, though, with guitars that chimed and rolled into some golden void, fog pouring out of keyboards, and so much empty nothingness surrounding the proceedings that everything took on a hollow 3D glow. The album's centerpiece, "Rolled Together", managed to out-Sigur Rós the great Hopelandic ones themselves in just under five minutes; when the band performed the song with Brooklyn bros Neon Indian for last year's regrettable (together) EP, they doubled the length. The results weren't ideal, but it made sense. And so the Antlers psychedelically steamroll along with Undersea, a four-track release that's been described as "an EP in length, but well beyond that in scope." (If that sounds like bong-session speak, remember Silberman's perfect prescription for listening to "Rolled Together": "best heard stoned with friends".) Since the band become a multi-person concern and broke free from its solo-project beginnings, the Antlers have been credited for production as a group, and their sense of hermetic, mutually reliant interplay has never been stronger than it is here. As they often do, the trio's created its own world within the 22 minutes allotted here-- only, the vibe is pure aftermath, with smoke rising from fresh embers and the environment taking on a lush yet deserted texture. If Hospice and Burst Apart were dark, rolling hills headed toward catharsis, well, here's the bottom. And what a gorgeous arrival it is. Every detail on Undersea sounds like breakable goods bought at a high-end flatwares store, and I mean that as the highest compliment-- it's all wrapped in thick, translucent gauze, not so much crash-landing as simply (but heavily) kissing the ground upon impact. "Endless Ladder", an eight-minute perpetual comedown with a title that's almost eye-rollingly evocative, surfs a single, stretchy riff with zen carelessness as frissons of synth noise and burbly echo-mic'd whine pass by. It's almost maddeningly head-in-the-clouds, but also something that, if it hits you at just the right time, you could possibly listen to on loop for hours. "Endless Ladder"'s three companions on Undersea aren't as openly contemplative (although the harp-and-horn blare of "Drift Dive" certainly comes close), instead leaning on the dark sonic undercurrents of post-adolescent tension that makes this band a big deal to many people. Still, the Antlers at their most mopey are still plenty elegant, so the dirge-like "Crest" ripples with laser swooshes and rattlesnake percussion, mining new depths of total paranoia. Speaking of feelings: There are plenty of them on display (this is the Antlers, after all), as Undersea's water-based theme finds a few uses for H2O other than pure hydration-- drowning, flooding, and subsequently destroying the world, and in the case of the sad-eyed kiss-off closer "Zelda", separating those who love one another. Silberman's lyrics are as simultaneously distant and evocative as ever, but the overwhelming amount of detail surrounding them renders them somewhat irrelevant here, a bubbling treasure chest in Undersea's sonically overwhelming fish tank. If you're the type that "can relate" to the Antlers' highwire drama, there's a solid chance this release could leave you cold. (On the other hand, if Hospice left you jeeringly and incorrectly shouting "My Bloody Bright Eyes!" then you just might love this.) "I'm not listening to [Neutral Milk Hotel's] In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as much as I was when I was 19," Silberman also told us back in the beginning of 2011, listing Portishead, Dirty Three, Boards of Canada, and the various strains of post-rock and electronic music as emerging influences in the now 25-year-old's musical mindset. Namechecking obscurists and hip-to-death backseat drivers (both of which are plentiful in the Antlers' native Brooklyn landscape) would quite possibly sneer at these admissions-- who hasn't had a moment with Geogaddi in their 20s?-- but what struck me upon reading those quotes, specifically, was Silberman's sincerity in growing as a music listener. So just as Silberman has laid bare his own messy, tormented angst as a means of moving on and becoming stronger, the Antlers as a band are growing up, and growing forth, into a career that's accruing fascinating weight with every move they make. They are a popular band, but in today's cool-kid, all-new-all-the-time musical culture, their emotional straightforwardness and debt to the since-canonical sounds of the past means that they perpetually risk being underappreciated. So ignore them if you dare, but consider yourself warned, too, that watching one of the biggest little groups in Brooklyn conjure such fascinating sonic shapes is becoming a reward in itself.

2012-07-26T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-07-26T02:00:00.000-04:00

Experimental / Rock

Anti-

July 26, 2012

03ba4deb-8e67-427b-a2b2-089b159a9223

Larry Fitzmaurice

https://pitchfork.com/staff/larry-fitzmaurice/

Love From Dust marks the minimalist Irish producer Donnacha Costello's return to making music after unspecified circumstances in 2010 led him to sell off his studio and abandon music entirely. The gentle, elegiac collection was recorded live in single takes and with no overdubs on an obscure Buchla Music Easel synthesizer.

Love From Dust marks the minimalist Irish producer Donnacha Costello's return to making music after unspecified circumstances in 2010 led him to sell off his studio and abandon music entirely. The gentle, elegiac collection was recorded live in single takes and with no overdubs on an obscure Buchla Music Easel synthesizer.

Donnacha Costello: Love From Dust

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20868-love-from-dust/

Love From Dust

For a minimalist, Donnacha Costello has always tended to think big. True, the Irish producer's debut album, 2000's Growing Up in Public, was an exquisitely restrained array of blips and digital crackle, but that turned out to be a red herring once you looked past the clicks. His 2001 album Together Is the New Alone was an example of ambient music at its most emotionally resonant, and from there he really broadened his horizons. Colorseries, his crowning achievement to date, sprawled across 10 different 12"'s that wrung every last drop of incandescence from a lean machine setup. Love From Dust is Costello's first album in five years. It marks his return to making music after unspecified circumstances in 2010 led him to sell off his studio and abandon music entirely. A more fortuitous set of circumstances brought him back: a custom-built EMS Synthi A, a rare analog synthesizer, finally became available to him after 13 years with his name on the waiting list. Costello's attempt to crowdfund the costs of recording a new album didn't meet his goal, so, alas, no Synthi. But he did raise enough to buy his backup choice, a Buchla Music Easel, which constitutes the album's entire instrumentation, save a pair of effects pedals. While it's not a concept album, it's very much an album determined by a specific set of constraints. The Music Easel is designed to be played in real time—the Philadelphia musician Charles Cohen, who also recorded his most recent album on the device, has described the instrument's benefits as "complicated control over simple sounds, as opposed to many other instruments, where you have very, very complex sounds but only simple control"—and to that end, Costello recorded his album live in single takes with no overdubs. It's striking that a synthesizer this obscure should turn up as the sole instrument on two albums in the same year, but the two records couldn't be more different. Where Cohen's music is wiry and alien, evoking transistors with indigestion, Costello's is gentle, elegiac, soft as a well-watered lawn in the shade. He favors slow-moving chord progressions and consonant tones and extreme repetition, and each of the album's seven tracks is built around a single repeating figure. (The bookending songs "Niigata Moment" and "Unconditional" are variations upon the same theme, which lends to the sense that the album is best absorbed in a single sitting—or, better yet, while dropping off to sleep.) The wistful "Ten Ton" patiently follows organ-like tones through a softly cycling chord progression; "Farewell" evokes Boards of Canada at their dreamiest, with silvery filaments that seem to dissolve in thin air. Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works Volume II is another obvious antecedent, both for its warm analog tones and its naïve melodies. Structurally, each track is a one-way street, repeating the same figure for so long that it's easy to forget that it's even playing. But then a note jumps up or down an octave, snapping you out of your reverie. And if you skip from the end of a track back to the beginning, you may be surprised to find how much has changed without you noticing, as the waveforms have grown teeth and toughened up, going from a lowing drone to a ragged growl. It all builds to a head with "Everything Is Going to Be", the album's penultimate track, and its longest. There's something about the distortion that makes its resolving chord progression feel even more satisfying; the tension registers as a physical vibration, and the release is just as visceral. At the music's peak, the tone is almost obscured by the buzz; it's like trying to catch a glimpse of a gorgeous landscape through narrowing blinds. It's a small moment that feels huge, a mark of Costello's talent not so much as a minimalist as an illusionist.

2015-08-06T02:00:04.000-04:00

2015-08-06T02:00:04.000-04:00

Electronic

self-released

August 6, 2015

03c0592c-4f11-4e3f-ab75-df296a1c7362

Philip Sherburne

https://pitchfork.com/staff/philip-sherburne/

After 2010 breakthrough Clinging to a Scheme LP, Sweden's the Radio Dept. return with a strong career overview based on their varied singles output.

After 2010 breakthrough Clinging to a Scheme LP, Sweden's the Radio Dept. return with a strong career overview based on their varied singles output.

The Radio Dept.: Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15035-passive-aggressive-singles-2002-2010/

Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010

The Radio Dept. have spent their whole career as underdogs. They are a band whose big moment has always seemed just out of reach, something compounded by the fact that they went album-less for four years, finally ending the dry spell with last year's fine Clinging to a Scheme. That record's success brought with it a swell of momentum-- two singles, an EP, and even a free Internet single to coincide with the Swedish elections. It was a period of activity that won them a whole new set of listeners, and the decision to reconcile their scattered career into an accessible singles collection seems to be a wise move. The first disc of Passive Aggressive aims to be just that-- a collection of chronologically ordered singles and album material that shows how much ground the Radio Dept. have covered in eight years. "Why Won't You Talk About It?" opens the set with in-the-red guitars and a drumbeat that seems to be endlessly on the verge of kicking in. Johan Duncanson's barely there vocals have a similar lackadaisical quality and effortless cool to Julian Casablancas of Is This It-era Strokes. It has a magnetic breeziness about it, and for all of the early-2000s signifiers and the blown-out lo-fi production, it actually sounds five years ahead of its time. After the debut album, Lesser Matters, the band took on a more electronic bent, showcased here by "The Worst Taste in Music", a well-executed piece of synth-pop reminiscent of the Pet Shop Boys and a stand-out moment on the collection. It's a shame that it is the sole representative from 2006's underrated Pet Grief. Much of that excellent record pre-dates many of the recent Balearic-leaning groups such as Korallreven, jj, and ceo, and this would have been an excellent opportunity to recast their significance as progenitors of that scene. At their best, as on last year's "Heaven's on Fire", the Radio Dept. internalize their varied influences-- dub, sample culture, synth pop-- and refocus them into a something that is unmistakably their own. Their identity is so hard-wired into the core of the sound that it means they can nod to slightly alien textures such as the offbeat keys and dub leanings of "Never Follow Suit" without it sounding contrived. The B-sides disc is less strong, and there are some odd choices-- the inclusion of throwaway instrumental "Tåget" over the excellent Cure-tinged cut "Deliverance" from the This Past Week EP is disappointing. There are a few highlights to be found, but even those, such as buzzy instrumental "Mad About the Boy", sound like sketches. At best, some of these songs show promise, at worst, the mostly minor-key explorations come across as labored and even overwrought in the case of "You and Me Then?". While it's interesting to hear the band experiment and stretch its legs, these tracks mark a lot of the disc out as fan-only material. The weakness of the second disc makes for a slightly awkward contrast as the collection straddles an uncomfortable middle ground between appeasing long-time fans with rarities and acting as a primer to the band's sadly underrated previous material. But while there are a few selection missteps overall, the first disc in particular makes for a great initiation to the Radio Dept.'s previous work. And that there is the opportunity to re-introduce this long undervalued band is something to cheer in itself.

2011-02-25T01:00:01.000-05:00

2011-02-25T01:00:01.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

Labrador

February 25, 2011

03c2accc-6773-41e0-8c09-477413fc3068

Hari Ashurst

https://pitchfork.com/staff/hari-ashurst/

The Beatles are the subject of yet another reissue campaign. This time it's a box set compiling the band's four 1964 U.S. albums-- Meet the Beatles, The Beatles' Second Album, Something New, and Beatles '65-- none of which have been previously issued on CD.

The Beatles are the subject of yet another reissue campaign. This time it's a box set compiling the band's four 1964 U.S. albums-- Meet the Beatles, The Beatles' Second Album, Something New, and Beatles '65-- none of which have been previously issued on CD.

The Beatles: The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1094-the-capitol-albums-vol-1/

The Capitol Albums, Vol. 1

I. What is this box set about? A. The set contains the first four American-version Beatles records, all from 1964, in mono and new stereo mixes. Meet the Beatles The Beatles' Second Album Something New Beatles '65 B. It also contains a 48-page booklet with notes by Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn (The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions). C. These albums have never been available on CD until now. D. These albums have never been available in stereo in any format until now. They were remastered from the original Capitol master tapes. The stereo effect was actually produced by using the two original tracks of mono, compressing them and then adding some reverb. (i.e., these aren't actual "stereo" performances, but "duophonic.") E. The albums are presented in miniature replicas of the original LP jackets. II. Is it worthwhile for Beatle fanatics? Casual fans? A. Since most fans have owned the British versions of the Beatles' albums for years, this set is most valuable to American fans who lived through Beatlemania, or as a curio to the rest of us. B. The packaging seems hastily assembled. The CDs don't even come in inner sleeves, so they always fall out when you pick them up. C. Casual fans would be better off sticking to the British albums (on EMI), as they contain most of this music in superior mixes. They also have the notable characteristic of being the records the Beatles wanted to make, unlike these Capitol-assembled compilations. D. Nobody really needs to own "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" twice-- owning the Past Masters sets takes care of all the non-album singles, and the British albums have the rest. III. Do the stereo mixes sound good? A. Remember, it's "duophonic," not stereo. The Pet Sounds reissue from a few years ago is a much better example of presenting in stereo an album that was originally released in mono. B. The Capitol mixes are filled with reverb. This gets annoying after a while, because all the vocals sound cavernous. C. That said, the instrumental tracks are clearer. IV. Why did they only do this for these albums, and not the rest of the catalog? A. The existing Beatles' CD catalog hasn't been remastered because there is no need. The sound is good, especially considering when they were remastered (1987). They still sell well. There's no need to fix what isn't broken. B. That said, I'd love to hear a 24-bit treatment of the Beatles' records. Few bands deserve to be heard in optimal sound more than them. V. How do the individual albums hold up? A. Meet the Beatles There isn't a bad song on this record, with the possible exception of McCartney's "Hold Me Tight", which lacks a good melody, and features some of the least interesting lyrics in the Beatles' canon ("Hold me tight/ Tell me I'm the only one/ And then I might/ Never be the lonely one"? D'oh!). Leading off with "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There" leads to a slightly anti-climactic experience for the remainder of the record. I can't imagine ever listening to the mono versions of these songs again. But then, I can't really imagine playing these albums much anyway. B. The Beatles' Second Album Alright, that's not fair. There is some historical value to hearing this stuff. So, go history. "She Loves You" is still one of my favorite Beatles singles. Cover version war: Lennon singing "Money" and "Please Mr. Postman" towers over McCartney's "Long Tall Sally" and Harrison's "Roll Over Beethoven". However, just like the British edition of Beatles for Sale (1964), this album seems overrun with covers. C. Something New Now we're getting good: "Things We Said Today" and "If I Fell" are two of the best pre-Rubber Soul Beatle songs. "And I Love Her" also nods to the direction the band would take starting in 1965. And yet, Capitol thought "Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" complimented them well. Still, this seems like the most thoughtfully compiled of the Capitol albums. D. Beatles '65 And this is the most haphazardly compiled. "I'm a Loser", "No Reply", and "I'll Follow the Sun" stand up to the best early Beatles songs, but seem out of place on a record featuring "Rock and Roll Music", "Mr. Moonlight", and "Honey Don't". "Everybody's Trying to Be My Baby" has more reverb than any song I've ever heard. Okay, maybe not more than that last Acid Mothers Temple album, but close. Capitol kept releasing different versions of the Beatles' records until Sgt. Pepper's in 1967. According to some, the Beatles protested in 1966 by delivering the infamous "butchered baby" cover photo for Yesterday... And Today. If Capitol put that in the next box, I'd give an extra point just on principle. VI. Anything else? Not really. I'm giving this a 6 because while there's a lot of great music here, there's very little incentive for me to play it, and none of these albums compare favorably to their British counterparts. Oh well. Next up: McCartney's ready for some football.

2004-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

2004-11-22T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rock

Capitol

November 22, 2004

03c593f0-f66b-477b-9d51-9fc75d3776d6

Dominique Leone

https://pitchfork.com/staff/dominique-leone/

On their 1991 breakthrough album, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were the partially-clothed id, barreling toward the funk and stumbling across inclusiveness along the way.

On their 1991 breakthrough album, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were the partially-clothed id, barreling toward the funk and stumbling across inclusiveness along the way.

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Blood Sugar Sex Magik

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22107-blood-sugar-sex-magik/

Blood Sugar Sex Magik

In 1984, the Red Hot Chili Peppers were a long shot to make it to the 21st century. They were a party band back then—too funky for hair metal, too cock-obsessed for college rock. (And that name, perfectly encapsulating the band’s essence while being incredibly gauche.) They wrote songs about their dicks; they then stretched cotton socks over those same dicks and jumped around on stage without fear of gravity. They were revered as a potent live act, and got some songs on the radio, but they’d yet to make a strong step forward—their own label balked at giving them resources. The decade passed with small successes—a gold record for 1989’s Mother’s Milk—and unexpected tragedies, such as the death of founding guitarist Hillel Slovak, with the hope of something better to come. In the music world, they were definitely not a big deal. And then, the world changed. By now, the hagiography about Nirvana’s Nevermind has been well-repeated: It terraformed the radio into new, unfamiliar shapes, it sparked a 10,000% rise in flannel sales; it broke pained groaning as a pop sound, etc. But it also set the tone for a decade more permissive of what a popular rock band could sound and look like, in ways that would reverberate far away from grunge or flannel obsessives. Their success allowed a fomenting alternasphere of bands who didn’t adhere to existing mainstream norms to rise up: Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden… and suddenly, the Chili Peppers. Blood Sugar Sex Magik was released on September 24, 1991, the same day as Nevermind, a neat coincidence for historical records, and perfect timing for their attempt at fitting into a broader cultural milieu. In its title—a phrase as ridiculous as their name—were the irreducible elements of their previous records, distilled into a declarative statement. Teenaged guitarist John Frusciante had been hired after the untimely death of Slovak, who passed away from a heroin overdose in 1988. Slovak rooted the band in their early sped-up punk-funk sound, a slurry molding of acts like Gang of Four, Jimi Hendrix, and Parliament-Funkadelic (George Clinton produced their second album, Freaky Styley). On those records, the Chili Peppers sounded like a live band trying to rein it in, with varying success. They’d never recorded two records with the same lineup, forcing them to continually jel on the fly. Frusciante changed all of that. His melodic instincts were languid and expressionist—a counterpunch to a rhythm section that wrote funk for moshing, allowing them to write open-hearted songs for the first time in their career. He found his footing following an up-and-down recording for Mother’s Milk, which forced him to shed his identity as a kid playing with his heroes. “The first year or so I wanted to be in the band so bad, I wanted to do a good job so much,” he said in an oral history of the group. “I was trying too hard to be like what I thought a Chili Pepper should be rather than just being myself… musically on guitar and in my personal life.” Part of this smoothing process was also due to their newly signed multi-million record deal with Warner, which pretty much necessitated they try to release something approaching a blockbuster. As producer, they brought in Rick Rubin, who by 1991 was already a monastic, perma-bearded guru with a reputation as band whisperer, having made high-profile career-best records with Slayer, the Cult, Danzig, and half the rap world. Unlike early producers, who gave the Chili Peppers specific direction and sounds to shoot for, Rubin allowed them to relax. Instead of recording in a studio, the band decamped to a spacious house in Laurel Canyon, where most of the members lived in between sessions. (Drummer Chad Smith commuted from his nearby Los Angeles home, because he was spooked by rumors the house was haunted; Frusciante reported once hearing a woman scream in some coital outburst, while Anthony Kiedis said psychic mediums had detected “sexual energy” in the house. Believe what you will.) Funky Monks, a documentary capturing the whole operation, presents an interaction between Frusciante and Kiedis that sums up the pull-and-push between their newfound artistic focus and their irrepressible sophomoric fuckery. Frusciante, earnest and clean-shaven, is exuberant. “We’re making an amazing, amazing, groundbreaking, revolutionary, beautiful, artistically heightened, incredible record,” he gushes. Next to him, Kiedis suppresses an eye-roll, deadpanning: “If Baron von Munchausen had ejaculated the four of us, being the Red Hot Chili Peppers, onto a chessboard, I would have to say Rick Rubin would be the perfect chess player for that particular board.” Frusciante, undone by his own guilelessness, grins like a dork. But Kiedis was learning to be earnest, too. “Under the Bridge” might have remained a scribbled-down poem had Rubin not spotted it while flipping through Kiedis’ notebook; he suggested he show it to the band, despite Kiedis’ reservations that it didn’t sound like it could be a Chili Peppers song. He was right, but that didn’t matter: They worked out a tempo and key, and later, Frusciante came up with a lonesome chord progression for what would become their defining moment. The power ballad sounded wildly different than anything they’d ever recorded; the lyrics were completely unmuddled by Kiedis’ rhetorical gesticulations, speaking plainly about an isolation felt after wandering the city in search of something your loved ones couldn’t provide. Millions of MTV viewers didn’t need to shoot heroin in order to connect with Kiedis’ allusive plea to be freed from his demons: “I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day/Take me to the place I love, take me all the way.” The video, which featured the enduring shot of Kiedis running shirtless in slow motion toward the camera, looking very zen-Danzig, played constantly on MTV, pushing their record sales even higher. It legitimized them as a “serious” band, for all their denuded giddiness, and became a mainstay of MTV’s “Buzz Bin” section, which plucked out promising singles and pushed them toward greater success. “Buzz Bin” videos were explicitly programmed to play three times a day, seven days a week, for eight weeks, while also receiving tangential news coverage around the network—and the Chili Peppers had two of them in “Under the Bridge” and “Give It Away.” In an era where MTV could still break new bands, that was no small tool in pushing their music to the mass audience they’d always craved. As they shared airspace with artful videos like “Losing My Religion” and “Jeremy,” a band that had once written a song called “Party on Your Pussy” was suddenly meaningful. The faded, tender spirit of “Under the Bridge” went with yearning songs like “Breaking the Girl” and “I Could Have Lied,” both penned about Kiedis’ doomed relationships. (The latter was allegedly inspired by a brief fling with Sinéad O’Connor—imagine those conversations.) They sounded sweeter, and somehow mature. For a long time, the Chili Peppers had been preoccupied with the grime and uninhibited physicality of sex. As Kiedis put it in his autobiography, which is punctuated every 15 pages with an X-rated anecdote: “You’re young and you’re not jaded yet and so the idea of being naked and playing this beautiful music with your best friends and generating so much energy and color and love in a moment of being nude is great. But you’re not only nude, you’ve also got this giant image of a phallus going for you.” That says it all, as does the album’s subject matter. A lot of songs are about what the boys liked to do best. The title track? It’s about fucking. The Cretaceous oogie-boogie of “Funky Monks,” in which Kiedis sneers “Every man has certain needs/Talkin’ ’bout them dirty deeds”? It’s about fucking. “Sir Psycho Sexy,” an over-eight-minute wet dream defined by its burping bass tone and letter-to-Penthouse lyrics? It’s about fucking. “Suck My Kiss,” with its “Mr. Brownstone” flow and fighter’s groove? Definitely about fucking—and by the way, one guess what the original title was supposed to be? The unapologetic attitude toward sex was reflected in the extended jams that dot the album. The Chili Peppers saw no need for a 30-second outro when two or four minutes might work, creating extra time for dancing and whoever-knows-what. You don’t have to read the Kiedis book to intuit that the Chili Peppers saw nakedness not just as lascivious romp—though, of course, there was that—but as pathway to a more unconscious, unrestrained state. They weren’t total goons; they were into mindfulness, and all that. The album opens with “The Power of Equality,” an explicitly anti-racist missive where Kiedis professes his love for Public Enemy and bellows “Say what I want, do what I can/Death to the message of the Ku Klux Klan.” “The Righteous and the Wicked” intones about a forthcoming environmental apocalypse owing to man’s selfish behavior, with Frusciante’s guitar tone sounding like a dark cloud pumped through a smokestack. Their gestures toward social justice were hardly sophisticated, less a well-reasoned dialogue than a full-throated “Racism fuckin’ sucks,” but that was the point. They were the partially-clothed id, barreling toward the funk and stumbling across inclusiveness along the way. During their performance at Woodstock ’99, they were asked by Jimi Hendrix’s sister to cover one of the late guitar legend’s songs as tribute; they picked “Fire,” which they’d performed for years, and ripped into it right as real bonfires were spreading at the festival, leading to the not-inaccurate charge they were literally fanning the flames. They mostly meant well, but didn’t always stick the landing. They were also still sometimes prone to fratty, unjustifiable behavior: Kiedis was once convicted of indecent exposure, and Flea and Smith were charged with battery and sexual harassment after an incident where they spanked and yelled at a female fan present for an “MTV Spring Break” performance. Many more examples of inappropriate behavior are out there, and while it’s easy to imagine their defense—“We were just having fun”; “we got out of control”; “we were too drunk”; pick one— it doesn’t mean they weren’t acting like assholes. This attitude found a home with a certain segment of listeners. In his book, Kiedis notes the label’s concerns that “a large segment” of their fan base would be alienated by a shot in the video for “Warped” where he and Dave Navarro (who played with them in the ’90s; it’s a long story) briefly kissed. As they got older, the Chili Peppers never really grappled with the ramifications of all their bad behavior (like, say, the Beastie Boys). They were a classic Los Angeles rock band, a city where thousands of behaviorally repugnant transgressions have been ignored in the name of entertainment. At their best, they folded their unbridled mentality into their burgeoning pop sensibility. “Give It Away” remains one of the memorable rock singles of the ’90s. Led by Flea’s hiccuping bass line, and filled out by Frusciante’s chrome-plated guitar work, it split the difference between the lizard-brain rock of their early days and the blissed-out spirituality they would later adopt. Kiedis was extremely on one, waxing existential like a naked priest you find at Burning Man: “There’s never been a better time than right now”; “Low brow but I rock a little know how”; “Reeling with the feeling don’t stop continue.” Gutter-minded it seemed, lines like “what I’ve got you’ve got to get it put it in you” weren’t sly ways of suggesting he’d like to hug and kiss you. (It’s a reflection on how love—the spiritual, not physical kind—has to be given away, taken from a life lesson gifted by the musician and artist Nina Hagen, with whom he was briefly involved.) Likewise, “Come and drink it up from my fertility” wasn’t only a literal request to suck his dick, even if he grabbed his junk in the video. For all the snark that Kiedis’—shall we say—unique lyricism attracts, he was nonpareil amongst rock singers at chaining solecistic, seemingly dada-esque thoughts into melodically effortless, rap-inspired verse. Though the Chili Peppers would inevitably inspire “rap-rock,” that wallet-chained spectre haunting the conclusion of the ’90s, Kiedis’ rubbery delivery, filled with hard inflections to catch your ear, softened what could’ve been an ugly clash of styles. “Give It Away” was certainly the best example of that virtuosic talent. It was also aided by an instantly eye-catching video, directed by French photographer Stéphane Sednaoui, which must have been storyboarded simply: “We’re gonna take you to the desert, smear you in silver paint, and let you Chi Pep the fuck out.” The indelible image of the shined-up Chili Peppers edited together in the same frame, writhing and flowing in balletic motion, snapshotted their vibe better than a million magazine profiles could. Generation-signifying album it might be, it’s hard not to notice that a quarter of the record could be lost at no harm. “Mellowship Slinky in B Major” sounds like the worst of the limpid funk-rap they’d later inspire; “Apache Rose Peacock” and “Naked in the Rain” are redundant with other tracks; “The Greeting Song” is openly despised by Kiedis himself, who said he was pushed to write it by Rubin. (Here he is, unequivocal: “To this day, I hate that song. I hate the lyrics, I hate the vocals.”) Of course, no one is listening to the album 25 years later because of “Mellowship Slinky in B Major.” It’s endured as a document of the moment when the Chili Peppers went widescreen—when they suddenly seemed like a band that might last for another 25 years. In 2016, the Chili Peppers signify nothing but themselves. But unlike the surviving members of the 1991 alt-rock class, their new music gets on the radio, and they remain massively popular by conventional metrics. (Their latest album debuted at No. 2 on the charts; a worldwide stadium tour is ongoing.) Blood Sugar Sex Magik is also a lodestone for a brand of more aggressive, politically negligent rock music that would emerge by the end of the ’90s. Their red-blooded punk-funk hybrid was the Beatles to a generation of misunderstood, aggro listeners who started bands like Korn and Limp Bizkit, and that sound was best exemplified on this record. Maybe that’s a dubious legacy, but it still makes them a significant reference point for any serious look at how the decade would turn out. Flea once praised Chad Smith’s drumming by saying he kept them from “floating off into the sissy-boy ether,” which explains their subliminal tilt toward jock rock. Nevertheless, a special mysterious something permeates the album. They were directly influenced by the darkened moods of Jane’s Addiction, their closest peer in the alternative scene (which is part of why Navarro joined the band), who drove them to pull something unexplained from the fringes of their creativity. It’s in the glitchy, lapping solo that plays in “Give It Away,” the ghostly flute touches on “Breaking the Girl,” the pyrotechnic outro to “Sir Psycho Sexy.” It’s in the album’s mythology: “They’re Red Hot,” a cover of the apocryphally Satan-indebted Robert Johnson, was recorded outdoors on top of a hill, as though the band were communing with the dead. A cosmic weariness brought on by Kiedis’ drug addiction, and the band’s realization of mortality in the wake of Slovak’s death, surrounds the songs. It’s seen through the lens of antic cock rock, but it’s there. All of it set the stage for the whole mystical California thing that would define their later years, and allow them to grow into a legacy rock band. It unlocked their ability to write any type of song within the Chili Peppers framework, and enabled them to write their biggest album, Californication, upon Frusciante’s reunion with the band due to a brief, exhausting separation. Frusciante would eventually leave again, and the band would struggle to reach the same creative heights, but it didn’t matter. The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction, Super Bowl halftime performance, the bass solo at Kobe’s last game—they slowly became iconic, known by their mononyms and their socks and the pleasure of trying to imitate Kiedis’ inimitable flow off the top of your head. Not bad for some Cali yucks.

2016-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-31T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Warner Bros.

July 31, 2016

03c5ca94-af30-43fe-ac27-aa98b87b152a

Jeremy Gordon

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jeremy-gordon/

This 4xCD box set is the most expansive and exhaustive summary of the rock'n'roll legend's long career, which had its share of ups and downs and ended on an impossibly high note with his 1989 album Mystery Girl and his work with the Traveling Wilburys.

This 4xCD box set is the most expansive and exhaustive summary of the rock'n'roll legend's long career, which had its share of ups and downs and ended on an impossibly high note with his 1989 album Mystery Girl and his work with the Traveling Wilburys.

Roy Orbison: The Soul of Rock And Roll

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12474-the-soul-of-rock-and-roll/

The Soul of Rock And Roll

Roy Orbison didn't shake his hips. He didn't set his piano on fire. Didn't wear blue suede shoes. Didn't become a preacher, marry his cousin, or go to jail. He wasn't what you'd call handsome, at least not in the sublime way that Elvis wore his looks. He was neither a rebel nor a rabble-rouser. He stood stock still and kept his head up. He sang about crying over girls, and his signature shades hid the tears in his eyes. He played a mean guitar, but sang a meaner ballad. He yearned and wept, but never moped. His stoic demeanor lent his tales of heartbreak a dignity that gave them verisimilitude and told his teenage listeners that all their confusion and pain-- all part of the culture, even if shunned by adults-- were real and worthwhile. Most efforts to laud Orbison, a first-generation rock'n'roller whose earliest hits were recorded at Sun Studio alongside Elvis, Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins, tend to appraise him as the granddaddy of some current trend, like emo, when in fact he is, like Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits, a more singular artist. With its natural quaver and multi-octave range, his voice allowed him to do things other singers could not, and his best singles pair his stately vocals with equally ornate arrangements. However, if indie musicians wanted to shelve their copies of Pet Sounds and Born to Run for a few years and start taking notes on Orbison, not only would that make my job a whole lot more interesting, but The Soul of Rock and Roll would be the place for them to start. This 4xCD box set is the most expansive and exhaustive summary of Orbison's decades-long career, which had its share of ups (the early 1960s, the late 80s) and downs (the 70s) and ended on an impossibly high note with his 1989 best-selling album Mystery Girl and his work with the Traveling Wilburys. Most Orbison comps begin at Sun Studio, with tender teenage hits "Devil Doll" and "Ooby Dooby" (Orbison may be the only singer who can make those two syllables not sound sexual and still sound interesting), but this set finds life before Memphis. Orbison was a guitar slinger with the Teen Kings in the early 50s, drawing from vocal groups, country and western, and rockabilly without really synthesizing them. Perhaps the most revealing track is "Guitar Pull Medley", a previously unreleased nine-minute recording of Orbison, by request, ripping through covers like "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You" and "That's All Right" at a party, proving he could hold his own against his more popular labelmate Elvis. Orbison's cool and easy proficiency with so many songs contrasts with his companion's starry-eyed demeanor. It sounds like a scene from Robert Altman's Nashville. The Soul of Rock and Roll is broken down primarily by decade-- a logical organizing principle even if it doesn't actually fit his career very precisely. Still, that means the second disc is far and away the best here, with a run of hits for Nashville-based Monument Records that's about as close to perfect as possible. "Uptown", "Only the Lonely", "Blue Angel", "In Dreams", and "Running Scared" (a modified bolero) are grandiose and operatic, lushly arranged, cleverly recorded (all in one take, with no overdubs), and as genuinely moving as pop music can be. Cathedrals to heartbreak, these early Monument recordings represent not only the set's high point, but the heyday of Orbison's career and the era that defined the rest of his catalog. The rest of his 60s output follows the same template, as Orbison and producer Fred Foster give similar treatment to "All I Have to Do Is Dream", the gorgeous "Blue Bayou", and the Willie Nelson-penned "Pretty Paper". The third disc covers Orbison's 70s output, but almost all of these songs predate that decade by several years. Following the deaths of his first wife in a motorcycle accident and two of his sons in a house fire, he spent most of the 70s away from the spotlight, but The Soul of Rock and Roll uses that downtime to argue convincingly that his strengths as a balladeer were matched by his prowess as a guitarist and his power as a performer. From 1963, his cover of "Mean Woman Blues", with its relentless beat, effervescent sha-la-la backing vocals, and yakkety sax, actually swings, especially on his fiery guitar solo. And his take on Ray Charles' "What'd I Say", recorded live in Holland, stomps and shimmies like his early rockabilly material. The final chapter is far and away the most surprising, a plot twist that no one could have predicted: Instead of fading away like, say, Carl Perkins, Orbison launched an improbable late-in-life comeback that's all the more remarkable for breezily updating his signature style while sidestepping bland dinosaur rock. "You Got It" and "She's a Mystery to Me", both from his swan song Mystery Girl, show only a few new wrinkles in his voice, which add texture and authority. His new recordings of "Oh Pretty Woman" and "In Dreams", both for his 1987 greatest hits album, of course can't improve on the originals, but aren't the disasters most re-recordings turn out to be. And Orbison is perfectly at home with the Traveling Wilburys on "Not Alone Anymore", although his verse on "Handle With Care" makes that song a notable omission in this set. The worst I can say about The Soul of Rock and Roll is that the liner notes are particularly unrevealing, a missed opportunity. An artist like Orbison, who despite his success haunts the periphery of rock history, not the center, demands a more balanced and in-depth approach that can contextualize his music without resorting to namedropping and can relate meaningful commentary without resorting to anecdote. Missing that textual component, the set loses some of its impact, but Orbison's songs-- at once modest and grandiose, showy and private-- provide all the testimony he needs.

2008-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00

2008-12-11T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock

Monument

December 11, 2008

03c8876f-4266-43a8-9c2d-46f88b3910a4

Stephen M. Deusner

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-m. deusner/

Guillermo Scott Herren collaborator's project is similarly enamored of Latin American psych-folk, scratchy beats, and warm, homemade production.

Guillermo Scott Herren collaborator's project is similarly enamored of Latin American psych-folk, scratchy beats, and warm, homemade production.

Helado Negro: Awe Owe

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13292-awe-owe/

Awe Owe

The concept of black ice cream-- what flavor is "black" anyway? licorice? walnut? black bean?-- sounds strange but refreshing. Which is an apt description of the music of Helado Negro, Roberto Carlos Lange's project named for the Spanish translation of that odd dessert. On his debut, Lange, the Florida-raised child of Ecuadorian immigrants, offers a lazy summer's day worth of dreamy, percussive tracks (almost entirely sung in Spanish) that pay homage to his roots yet use broad brush strokes from a silvery, futuristic palette. It's like Beck's version of Tropicália, but bled of his white-boy admiration of the exotic. You may recognize Lange from his work in Guillermo Scott Herren's Savath y Savalas, a project that is similarly enamored of Latin American psych-folk, scratchy beats, and warm, homemade production. And, in a lot of ways (most notably its blend of traditional Latin music with the elastic sonics of experimental electronica), Awe Owe sounds like a follow-up to Savath y Savalas' La Llama, which was released earlier this year. Except that there is no place for Llama's spooky undercurrent amidst Awe Owe's feather-weight, beachy effervescence. Without the steely, mechanical effects and dark, tinny din that are clearly preoccupations of Herren's, Lange is free to leave lots of airy space between his chattering percussion and loopy xylophone melodies and play with whispery bossa nova textures without being overwhelmed by rhythmic heaviness. Without hooks to hang on to, though, or vocals to serve as your guide-- most of the singing here is washed out, like the sun-bleached stucco of homes by the shore-- this album gives off a first impression of curiously constructed background music. But like a pointillist painting, the individual songs seem fuzzy and indistinct until you look at the album as a whole, and only then do they sharpen into view. Opener "Venceremos" (translation: "we will triumph") gives the album a whimsical start, with a plucky xylophone run that's reminiscent of Stephen Malkmus' "Phantasies". The track then finds its groove with trotting percussion that sounds like horse hooves against cobblestone streets and an acoustic strum so breezy that you can practically smell the saltwater in the air. With its ambiance so clearly stated from the get-go, the album then moves on into Animal Collective territory with "Espuma Negra", which builds its psych-tinged track over a hypnotic, repetitive core riff. Then "Dos Sueños" lives up to its title (which translates to "two dreams") with an ethereal, winding melody, spare, plinky orchestration, and some tangy harmonized "oohs" that are so mellifluous they almost sound created by synthesizers or a Theremin instead of human voices. The album is frontloaded, though, and the middle, mostly instrumental section is somewhat forgettable and monotonous before giving way to the best song on the record. After roughly 35 minutes of organic melodies spackled over electronic beats and effects, closing track "Deja" surprises with its handclap percussion, which makes a nice bed for Lange's hushed, easy singing, nimble fingerpicking, and the ominous sound of distant church bells. Eventually the track displays Lange's mechanical proclivities, layering hard-edged scrapes and computerized bubbles under its echo-y vocal melody, making it the only track on the collection that sounds like it is meant to be listened to, not by the sea, but 20,000 leagues under it. Lange made Awe Owe in his home studio in Brooklyn with different friends and collaborators (from the aforementioned Herren to Stars Like Flea's Shannon Fields) floating in and out of the sessions, and this gives the album the feel of being stitched together like a homemade quilt. And like a quilt, it is warm and comforting, if not necessarily dynamic. So while it may never deviate from its mid-tempo lull, its mellow, reflective songs are goosed by their Latin melodies, making it a languidly satisfying complement to the hazy, hot final weeks of summer.

2009-08-25T02:00:02.000-04:00

2009-08-25T02:00:02.000-04:00

Electronic

Asthmatic Kitty

August 25, 2009

03cd281c-e31b-4c2d-8126-a7e4324aac8d

Pitchfork

Incredibly, this is the first U.S. CD release of the legendary punk album from Ari Up and company.

Incredibly, this is the first U.S. CD release of the legendary punk album from Ari Up and company.

The Slits: Cut

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7803-cut/

Cut

Here are some things you might already know about Cut, even if you haven't heard one note of the Slits' music: This is the first time the album's been released domestically in the U.S. on CD (with the obligatory bonus tracks). The album cover features three members of the group wearing nothing but mud and loincloths. When the group first formed, they couldn't play their instruments for shit. The songs on the album offer an amalgam of punk's abrasive DIY WTF-ness and the spacious relaxed rhythms of dub reggae. This album is a keystone for any and all punk-based grrrl movements. And-- though it goes without saying, it's often said anyway-- this album is terribly, terribly important in the history of the rock music and the grand scheme of canonical flippity floo flap. Funny thing is, for all its import, Cut is actually a lot of fun. Fun in the way Ari Up trills and coos and yelps across the songs like a precocious schoolgirl taunting all the boys and teachers. Fun in the way Viv Albertine scratches and waxes her guitar. Fun in the way Tessa's bass and Budgie's drums slip in and out of grooves like lovers test-driving the Kama Sutra. Fun in the way the group turns every subject it touches into a giddy playground sing-a-long, whether it be a diatribe against pre-set gender roles ("Typical Girls"), a story about Sid Vicious and Johnny Rotten butting heads ("So Tough"), a cautionary tale about PiL's Keith Levene's drug use ("Instant Hit"), or songs tackling other didactic topics like invasive media propaganda, shoplifting and the idealized love of a new purchase. Fun in the way producer Dennis Bovell employees spoons and matchboxes as beat accents (in "Newtown"), centers the group's meanderings with a little piano or more traditional percussion, and allows the band to occupy both punk and dub at the same time. The Slits don't destroy passerby: They stop them, dance around them, sing songs to and about them, playfully taunt and tease them, and then pass them the dutchie. The bonus tracks are OK add-ons-- the group's version of "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" was slated to be the record's first single way back in the day, and would have served fine as another respectfully disrespectful punk cover, but appropriately ended up as the B-side to the actual first single, "Typical Girls". "Liebe and Romanze (Slow Version)" is an instrumental version of "Love Und Romance" bathing in the hot and welcome tropical sun outside of Lee Perry's studio, and serves as a pleasant cool down after the frenetic shenanigans that preceded. But, of course, if you're giving this album a spin, it's for the first 10 tracks, and if you're coming to them for the very first time, then I envy you. Yes, this is an important document, and part of any balanced popular musical diet, but this isn't a multi-vitamin-- this is skipping school as spring turns to summer to spend an extra-long lunch with friends driving to the not-so-local Jamaican bakery for a few beef patties and some much-needed fresh air. Take a long, deep breath, and enjoy the moment while it lasts.

2005-02-23T01:00:02.000-05:00

2005-02-23T01:00:02.000-05:00

Rock

Island

February 23, 2005

03d1c895-bd9d-4308-a649-919ffc65a459

David Raposa

https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-raposa/

The hushed flows from the Brooklyn-based rapper are compelling, but some of her stories struggle to captivate.

The hushed flows from the Brooklyn-based rapper are compelling, but some of her stories struggle to captivate.

Nappy Nina: Mourning Due

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nappy-nina-mourning-due/

Mourning Due

If Nappy Nina were a comic book character, her thought bubbles would fill whole panels. In her music, the Oakland-raised, Brooklyn-based rapper’s thoughts flow in arcing run-ons that skip from prayers to confessions to flexes. Her latest album, Mourning Due, adds sighs to this skittish mix, reckoning with unspecified losses that stalk Nina’s writing and performances like a shadow. Though she never fills in this looming backstory, strong features and beats keep the music engaging. Nina has a pianissimo timbre that brings to mind your “inside voice,” to use a grade school phrase. Her near-whisper and poetic lyricism somewhat recall Ladybug Mecca and Noname, but her love of double-time cadences and assonant rhyme schemes puts her closer to Homeboy Sandman and fellow Oaklander Suga Free. Yet unlike all of those rappers, Nina rarely writes punchlines or jokes, instead chronicling her life as a queer Black woman in Brooklyn. She’s too guarded to be considered a diarist, but her lyrics are rooted in everyday concerns, especially survival. “I’m saying, lately I’m staying/Tethered to turfs where I’m sanctioned,” she raps on “Amen,” outlining her fraught relationship with public spaces.  Her frequent allusions to grief suggest private spaces don’t offer much sanctuary either, though the writing never builds on these brief disclosures. “My lists of loss are lengthy,” she says on “Sorrel Sip,” a typical gloss. To cope, she turns to weed and sleep, but slumber offers little consolation. She either wakes up and feels unrested, or is unable to tuck in and quiet her mind, a vicious cycle captured by both the cheeky album art and a vivid line from “Amen”: “I awoke in a fire, so tired kept sleeping.” The production often taps into that conflicted sense of drowsy jitter, pairing nocturnal torpor with restless motion. New York producers dane.zone (Sonnymoon, Quelle Chris), JWords (Maassai, MIKE), and Nelson Bandela (Terence Etc., Nick Hakim) provide nearly all the beats. They favor a one-two punch of loopy keys and hard, shuffling percussion, a combo that fits Nina’s hushed but racing anxiety raps. “Peddles” exemplifies the album’s sound, as Nina and guest OHMi glide over teetering drums and airy chords. In her verse, Nina uses the phrase “hyperlink-type beats,” a funny and apt description of Mourning Due’s electro boom bap sound and that of other upbeat, electronic-inspired production styles seen on H3IR’s ve·loc·i·ty, Wiki and NAH’s Telephonebooth, and They Hate Change’s Finally, New. These albums avoid the punch-drunk soul loops that have dominated underground rap for the past few years, popularized by Earl Sweatshirt, Roc Marciano, and Griselda Records. The departure from that approach suggests it may be losing appeal in some corners, though no particular ethos appears to be driving the shift. Whatever the cause, there’s clearly a growing interest among producers and rappers in the textures and cadences of noise, ambient, and trip-hop, as seen on recent albums like Moor Mother and billy woods’ BRASS, as well as JPEGMAFIA’s All My Heroes Are Cornballs—the strongest records this turn has produced. The production on Mourning Due isn’t as adventurous as anything on those records, but its bubbly digital textures enliven Nina’s flows. The album loses steam when the beats take cues from R&B, growing more leisurely and atmospheric. Those instrumentals are strong on their own, but they don’t fit Nina’s bashful style—a mismatch underscored by the magnetic presence of the many featured artists, who basically all hit home runs. Moor Mother’s verse on “Stone Soup” is the album’s best: In the span of a minute, she coolly interpolates Nas’ “Ether” and references time travel, Kara Walker tableaus, and “Bennie and the Jets”—a mix of wit, personal touchstones, and precise imagery that eludes Nina for 14 songs. Mourning Due is her strongest release, but she’s not yet figured out how to turn stray thoughts into developed ideas.

2023-02-23T00:01:00.000-05:00

2023-02-23T00:01:00.000-05:00

Rap

LucidHaus

February 23, 2023

03d2635d-d3ba-4145-b03f-5d457650e133

Stephen Kearse

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stephen-kearse/

Common and Kanye West continue the sound of 2005's solid comeback Be with a follow-up that attempts to inject it with a bit of Dilla-fied Soulquarians style.

Common and Kanye West continue the sound of 2005's solid comeback Be with a follow-up that attempts to inject it with a bit of Dilla-fied Soulquarians style.

Common: Finding Forever

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10483-finding-forever/

Finding Forever

There's one line on Common's new album, Finding Forever, that keeps sticking with me, and it comes right about in the middle, on "Southside": "Back in '94 they called me Chi-town's Nas." It's accurate in more ways than the idea that Resurrection is the Midwest's Illmatic: Both MCs have spent the past 13 years struggling with artistic detours, shifting audiences, and diminishing returns, Nas taking the cash-in route with the commercial-skewing (and subsequently underrated) It Was Written while Common's street-level bohemianism gradually and inadvertently narrowcasted him towards an audience of, as he infamously put it, "coffee shop chicks and white dudes." Both of them came back later in their careers with fires lit under their asses, though there's a difference between being called out by Jay-Z for being washed-up and being called out by your fans for turning into a flat-out freak (see: Electric Circus). Seeing as how Be was a commercial, critical, and fanbase success that restored Common's rep, it's weird that its successor follows its winning formula to the letter yet somehow sounds comparatively lead-footed and tired. Although the Kanye West partnership that flourished in Common's 2005 return to form felt like something that could reap a lot of creative dividends over the course of subsequent albums, Finding Forever is a turn toward going through the motions, weighed down by an adult-contemporary atmosphere that mistakes fatigue for relaxation. There's screw albums with more liveliness than this. Common may not have gotten more confident as he's matured-- he didn't really need to, already having developed an authoritative voice by age 22, and at 35 he's still as comfortable taking the pulpit as any MC his age-- but his street wisdom and his man-of-the-people rhetoric have developed a cynical tone that too often turns his tales of humanistic living and tragedy into joyless scolding. The righteousness worked well on Be since Common tended to leave the self- out of it, and there's a few moments on Finding Forever that succeed for the same reason; his intricately delivered insights into the vicious cycle of ghetto life in "Black Maybe" ("We leanin' on a wall that ain't, that ain't stable/ It's hard to turn on the hood that made you/ To leave, be afraid to, the same streets that raised you can aid you") and his barbed fury on "Start the Show" ("With 12 monkeys on the stage it's hard to see who's a guerilla/ You was better as a drug dealer") don't just hit hard, they hit precisely. But the narrative in "Misunderstood" about the loosely defined street hustler and the college girl turned drug-addict stripper seem more distant than the more firsthand-feeling observations in Be's closing track "It's Your World", and the first verse of "The Game" has so many disconnected talking points (global warming, spoiled rich teenagers, black power, the greatness of Big Daddy Kane) over the course of 40 seconds that it feels like a suffocating avalanche of conscious-rap clichés. And sometimes it gets borderline-Mencia ignorant: Describing white people's supposed unfamiliarity with day-to-day struggles on "The People" requires a lot more insight than claiming they prefer to "focus on dogs and yoga" (is that how Jeremy Piven lived on the set of Smokin' Aces?), and if the flirtation in "Break My Heart" was a real-life conversation, it'd probably wind up being mocked on Overheard in Chicago: "It was a dream day/ Met her on Spring Break/ Look like the type that be like 'no habla Ingles'/ She said 'you look like you rap, where's your bling-ay/ And your clothes are tight but you don't seem gay'/ I said 'naw, that's dude from N-Sync-ay.'" At least when he griped about black men dating white women, he tried reminding himself to go beyond the surface. And he didn't lace it with a series of warmed-over pop-culture wisecracks, either: Between the references to OK Go's treadmill video, the crazy astronaut lady, and gossip-rag celebrity couples (Kimora Lee and Russell Simmons, sure, but Ryan Phillippe and Reese Witherspoon?) on the Lily Allen-augmented "Drivin' Me Wild," he's more VH-1 than KRS-One. But while it's easy to pick and choose the goofiest shit Common says on a record, the lyrics aren't necessarily what makes Finding Forever so tedious. Kanye West, who once again produces the majority of the album, has tried making a tribute to Common's Jay Dee-fueled Soulquarian-era sound, and he doesn't fit it well at all, managing half of its vibe and none of its energy. "Southside" features a guitar riff that sounds like a rote impersonation of the bugged-out synth on Donuts' "Da Factory"; "Forever Begins" relies too heavily on a washed-out supper-club piano and an obvious break from Paul Simon's "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover"; and even the fairly close approximations-- particularly the 70s Hancock/Wonder soul-jazz of "The People" and "Break My Heart"-- lack Dilla's knack for immaculate drum programming and thick, rich bass. (The first time I heard "The People" was in a taxi with the windows slightly cracked, and once we hit the freeway all I could hear under the wind was a weak snare shot.) It doesn't help that the inclusion of a genuine Jay Dee beat on the album-- the lush "So Far to Go," which already appeared on last year's Dilla elegy The Shining with different lyrics-- makes Kanye's shit sound even more ersatz. It could just be a matter of an album needing the right audience: Its over-earnest soul-rap production and righteous indignation might strike a nerve with anyone who's under the impression that "real rap" needs to be saved from some evil influence (like, I don't know, Southern tracks with hooks or whatever). The problem is, Common already brought this "real" hip hop back two years ago, and by presenting a weaker, more frivolous and significantly duller version of it, he's risking falling into the same routine of formulaic coasting as the white-tee strawmen older heads gripe about. Call it Be Minus, and let me know when he's found his spark again.

2007-07-30T02:00:01.000-04:00

2007-07-30T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rap

Geffen

July 30, 2007

03d439c0-6723-4a9d-8c18-011b58918f19

Nate Patrin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/

A huge misstep, Lupe Fiasco's new LP simply sounds bad, playing against every single one of his strengths and creating new weaknesses.

A huge misstep, Lupe Fiasco's new LP simply sounds bad, playing against every single one of his strengths and creating new weaknesses.

Lupe Fiasco: Lasers

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15208-lasers/

Lasers

One of the few things more depressing than actually listening to Lupe Fiasco's new album, Lasers, is imagining the monumentally emasculating studio sessions it took to make it. It's easy for label heads to see the commercial success of arena-rap like "Empire State of Mind" and "Love the Way You Lie"-- or crossover debuts such as Nicki Minaj's Pink Friday and B.o.B.'s The Adventures of Bobby Ray (Lupe turned down the Alex Da Kid beats to "Airplanes" and the Smeezingtons' "Nothin' on You") -- as a public mandate for more of the same. But wouldn't it just be easier to find someone down for the cause rather than to remake the public persona of someone who's already established? Lasers simply sounds bad, playing against every single one of Lupe Fiasco's strengths and creating new weaknesses. Surveying the current pop-rap landscape and retaining nothing worthwhile, it's at once chaotic, bored, and yet unyieldingly abrasive-- overblown, forced choruses, rawk guitar tracks that had to be laid down by a guy with a ponytail, mixing as subtle as a nu-metal record. There's a guy on several of these songs singing putrid hooks through what sounds like vocal filters retrieved from Dan Deacon's recycle bin-- he's named MDMA. This is a coincidence of cosmic proportions. And then there's single "The Show Goes On", so gallingly lazy, I'm at least willing to view it as some sort of next-level parody of A&Rs asleep in the hit factory-- it would certainly be a more clever indictment than "Dumb It Down". This is one that "interpolates" Modest Mouse and trades Isaac Brock's fuck-all optimism for Lasers' most blatant attempt to siphon juice from Recovery's redemption-story treacle. Look, "Float On" is a great song, not a sacred text but interpolated into a half-Branson, half-Disney brass fanfare somehow cheapens it worse than any appearance on Kidz Bop or "American Idol". But if this was simply "man, shame about some of the beats and hooks," someone might assume they stumbled onto a review of Food & Liquor or The Cool. Whether it's self-sabotage or a total lack of inspiration, the major difference here is that Lupe isn't working hard or playing hard. Doing just enough to escape his 16 bars before the next bombshell chorus blows, he fills his verses with guh-inducing wordplay, one-note concepts (the central metaphor of "Out of My Head" was deep enough to support a Drew Barrymore/Hugh Grant movie), or stock attempts at anguish ("Beautiful Lasers (2 Ways)"), uplift ("Coming Up"), and non-conformity ("State Run Radio"). You can't knock him for trying something new, but the tools he should be using-- his rubbery wordplay, thoughtful commentary, sheer love of the art form-- get ditched, with nothing interesting to replace them. This is mostly true even on the songs that sound like Atlantic's reward to Lupe for holding up his end of the bargain. Or maybe I'm wrong about all this and in time, Lasers will make the bean counters happy enough to grant Lupe the resources to and freedom to do whatever he envisions as his classic. Then again, his emo past is well noted-- as is the chip on his shoulder. Lupe often has enough trouble staying out of his own way, yet Lasers doesn't suffer for that reason; it just feels like the flaming wreckage of a project that never had a prayer.

2011-03-16T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-03-16T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Atlantic

March 16, 2011

03d48fa8-3a58-4035-8022-faf1cc69d2c7

Ian Cohen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ian-cohen/

Remix albums rarely have purely noble intentions. From underground promotional vehicles to hobbyist experiments for props at local watering holes ...

Remix albums rarely have purely noble intentions. From underground promotional vehicles to hobbyist experiments for props at local watering holes ...

Danger Mouse: The Grey Album

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2540-the-grey-album/

The Grey Album

Remix albums rarely have purely noble intentions. From underground promotional vehicles to hobbyist experiments for props at local watering holes, the concept of backing familiar voices with unexpected surroundings had been all but lost to simpler production clinics with high profile guests. That is, until Danger Mouse (best known for his work with Jemini and Sage Francis) turned a color inference into an underground phenomenon with his bootleg conceptual assault, The Grey Album, a remix album that pairs the vocals of Jay-Z's Black Album with The Beatles' legendary White Album. By the most basic rules of the homemade remix, the record works: The vocals are on beat, pauses are natural, and the background always works thematically with the lyrics. In these more technical areas, the record effectively succeeds. But the most exciting part of any remix project is hearing whether or not the producer can save your least favorite songs, and this is clearly where DM shines. "Moment of Clarity" was the kind of awkwardly misplaced synthetic emotion expected from posthumous Tupac records. Here, however, it's a stomping guitar monster, with John Lennon's chopped vocals croaking like one of its victims. And while the original "Dirt Off Your Shoulder" sounded like Timbo going through the motions (if he decided to morph into The Neptunes for a day), Danger Mouse's rendition is like Prefuse 73 meeting David Banner, arguing chops over handclaps and eventually finding middle ground through a second strangulation of Mr. Lennon. Of course, it isn't all so progressive. Similar to the fates of "December 4th" and "Change Clothes", "What More Can I Say" works on the tone it develops, but ultimately ends up too simple to hold attention. "My 1st Song" is enjoyable for the harsh drums that DM tracks and the closing statements that have Jay-Z doing the Charleston over "Cry Baby Cry". Of course, Shawn Carter's elastic speed-rap is near impossible to capture, as evidenced by the distracting guitar-crashing effect which closes off every few couplets. Most glaringly, no remix attempt is made on "The Threat", arguably Jay-Z's hardest performance on The Black Album, while "Lucifer" is sacrificed at the altar of conceptualism: DM simply inverts a couple Jigga vocals, chops up vocals and pianos, and inserts a bass riff and orchestral bits from "I'm So Tired" and "Revolution 9". Though DM's takes are obviously more rock-centric than the original Jay-Z tracks, they still manage to be undeniably in tune with the spirit of hip-hop. "PSA" is turned from a menacing spin on a Black Moon standard to woodland crunk with rings of Robin Hood flute, acoustic finger flicking and truncated outbursts from George Harrison. And "99 Problems" turns the obvious rock nod into a slightly more pronounced clinic in "Helter Skelter" headbanging, with panning walls of guitar sound and a chugging main riff that, in this context, reminds me of Kool Keith's "I'm Destructive". Danger Mouse was recently issued a cease-and-desist by EMI regarding this project's Beatle-sampling. While he insists the record was intended only as a promotional item, 3,000 copies are already in circulation, and one can't help but feel the loom of a forthcoming lawsuit. So the question now is, was the creative payoff of this project worth the possibilities of this potential worst-case-scenario? Well: While The Grey Album is truly one of the more interesting pirate mashups ever done, it ultimately fails at the hands of perfectionism with several pieces sounding rushed to beat some other knucklehead to his clever idea. Additionally, the missing songs and occasionally poor tracking means the project take a few hits. Still, it's stronger than it ought to be given the disparity between the two artists, and as far as raw experimentation goes, it further proves DM as a wildly imaginative producer. Even taken out of the context of listenability, The Grey Album will end up the trivia answer we'll always love to submit.

2004-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

2004-02-16T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

self-released

February 16, 2004

03d6e243-a69c-44a4-b22f-59e4a4a93236

Rollie Pemberton

https://pitchfork.com/staff/rollie-pemberton/

SZA is TDE's newest artist, the first woman and R&B singer to sign to the label. Her debut album Z plays out like a fractured memory you struggle to piece together fully: there are shards of clarity, but only that.

SZA is TDE's newest artist, the first woman and R&B singer to sign to the label. Her debut album Z plays out like a fractured memory you struggle to piece together fully: there are shards of clarity, but only that.

SZA: Z

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/19278-sza-z/

Z

When thinking back on the early careers of Kendrick Lamar, Schoolboy Q, and Ab-Soul—the household names on the label Top Dawg Entertainment—one element that sticks out is how easy it was to understand each rapper's point of view: Kendrick as the slick-talking, perceptive narrator with a fixation on the Reagan era of the 1980s, Schoolboy as the cocky street-hustler who turns gangsta rap on its head, Ab-Soul as the paranoid hippie. With recent signee Isaiah Rashad, the label has kept it up, presenting an assured artist in the lineage of the South's great thinking-man's MCs. But the ability, or perhaps desire, to be understood immediately eludes TDE's newest artist SZA, the first woman and R&B singer to sign to the label. Her debut album Z plays out like a fractured memory you struggle to piece together fully: there are shards of clarity, but only that. Of course, not every album needs to be completely digestible, but Z is not the sort of mysteriously seductive record that reveals itself over time. Instead, it has walls that are tough, if not impossible, to punch through, making for an unnecessarily frustrating listen that too often feels guarded. It is clear that SZA knows precisely what she wants her music to sound like: Z is essentially a chillwave album, every song resting softly on a bed of gauzy keyboard tones as muffled guitar figures and teetering drum patterns float by like dust in the sunlight. The results sound less weird than that description implies, since plenty of current R&B music folds back towards the same slumbering fog that defined chillwave. But very little chillwave featured female vocals—unless you include Beach House (previously sampled by Lamar, natch), spiritual ancestors of SZA whose DNA also courses through Z. A female R&B singer's version of a chillwave album could be both novel and contemporary if executed well, but Z is deeply flawed. Z's biggest problem is that, despite choosing a sound that is soft and somnolent, SZA is too often overpowered by the music. The album is a glimmering swirl, but her voice gets lost. In a literal sense, it can be hard to hear her: on tracks like "Warm Winds", "Shattered Ring", and "Omega", her vocals are as ethereal as the beat, as entire songs dissipate into a mist. It's also impossible to get a sense for who she is. What is SZA going through? What has she been through? Unfortunately, Z does not reveal the answers to these questions, cutting against both the nature of her label and R&B as a genre. The album opens up when SZA does, but that happens only in slices: the offhand aside of "Your skin tastes like brussels sprouts, I swear" on "Ur", the muttered plea of "Do you want to know me?" on the soulful "Child's Play", or the bracing humor of "Bumping that Jadakiss is dangerous for your sanity" on "Shattered Ring." "HiiiJack," produced by Toro y Moi, is the only time the album blossoms into a real, affecting chorus: "Sometimes I keep you in my mind/ Sometimes I let you go up high/ I'm using everything I find/ Do anything to keep you tied up." Here, SZA comes from an identifiable, relatable place, making a strong—and maybe even irrational—statement of devotion. With a beat that is both off-kilter and soothing and a chorus that floats away slowly like an ascendant balloon, it's a song so good that more like it could have pried Z all the way open. But that power rests solely with SZA, and hopefully she'll harness it on whatever comes next.

2014-04-18T02:00:02.000-04:00

2014-04-18T02:00:02.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Top Dawg Entertainment

April 18, 2014

03d8c64c-61a7-421a-86ce-25cd16dad2e2

Jordan Sargent

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/

This Baltimore duo sand the edges between quiet and loud, gentle and rough, hard and soft, clean and dirty, and make their best LP in the process.

This Baltimore duo sand the edges between quiet and loud, gentle and rough, hard and soft, clean and dirty, and make their best LP in the process.

Wye Oak: Civilian

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15195-civilian/

Civilian

Civilian opens with the sound of ambient chatter, a room full of voices quickly washed away by steeled guitar and electronics. It's a shift at odds with the polar dynamics this Baltimore-based duo has sworn by in its half-decade career. In a 2009 interview, The Onion's AV Club asked guitarist/vocalist Jenn Wasner if her band's knack for suddenly juicing volume was done with the live experience in mind. "We won't admit this to ourselves often," Wasner said, "but the way we play live is based on loud-quiet breaks, super-huge jumps in volume and distortion. Sometimes it's really important to explode with huge amounts of volume. Whether it's out of a creative impulse, or just an angry one where it's like, 'Hey everyone, look over here!'….It's fun to absolutely dominate a room for a couple of seconds." But those first seconds of opener "Two Small Deaths" are telling: On this, their third full-length, Wye Oak's tendency to smack listeners with giant, unannounced surges of distortion has been tempered. Wasner and Stack have taken to sanding the edges between quiet and loud, gentle and rough, hard and soft, clean and dirty. From there they've crafted their best LP yet. It's an awful lot of ground for a duo to cover, but these two have their ways. As in the case of the White Stripes, it starts with Wasner's guitar. While Marnie Stern and Kaki King tend to run away with top honors and attention amongst female guitarists, Wasner's wailing has remained largely unnoticed. Civilian should change that. Whether it's spare, elegant chords like those on closer "Doubt", or the corkscrewing figures of "The Alter" and Sonic Youth snarl of "Holy Holy", she displays marvelous range and power. Since Wye Oak began recording under the Merge flag in 2008, their combination of boy-girl hymns and dreamy, sometimes shoegazing sonics, have garnered accurate comparisons to the likes of Yo La Tengo. Though they still hew closely to 90s indie rock, their label found a way of describing their sound best as "21st Century Folk." That's a big umbrella but it works because one very malleable influence imbues this particular set of songs more than any other: Neil Young. You can hear Shakey in Wasner's storytelling just as much as her guitar-playing, this album's titular track and centerpiece. It's a fingerpicked, relationship still life that slowly expands before erupting into a clenched-fist coda solo that's one of this album's most arresting moments. But don't sleep on Stack. His time-keeping here is understated when it ought to be and gargantuan when a song's climb requires it, the tick-tocking-turned-feral stomp of "Dogs Eyes" rolling both into one. More impressive, however, are the synth elements he adds to each effort; they breathe life into spaces that didn't have any before. I have yet to hear these songs played live, but together, as they are on record here, this band sounds like more than just an army stuffed into a bedroom. While plodders like "Fish" and "Plains" revert back to extremes, late burner "We Were Wealth" does the exact opposite. What begins as a languid, guitar-driven mood piece, blooms into something far more delicious. Wasner's satin vocals lift, Stack couples a key-driven pulse with splashes of delay and crash cymbal, and what we're left with is fireworks of a dozen colors. They have our attention from beginning to end.

2011-03-11T01:00:01.000-05:00

2011-03-11T01:00:01.000-05:00

Rock

Merge

March 11, 2011

03da153c-2f65-4e8c-a097-39d03f9a13f3

David Bevan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-bevan/

Like many music lovers of a certain age, I have a lot of warm memories tied up with release days. I miss the simple ritual of making time to buy a record. I also miss listening to something special for the first time and imagining, against reason, the rest of the world holed up in their respective bedrooms, having the same experience. Before last Wednesday, I can't remember the last time I had that feeling. I also can't remember the last time I woke up voluntarily at 6 a.m. either, but like hundreds of thousands of other people around the

Radiohead: In Rainbows

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10785-in-rainbows/

In Rainbows

Like many music lovers of a certain age, I have a lot of warm memories tied up with release days. I miss the simple ritual of making time to buy a record. I also miss listening to something special for the first time and imagining, against reason, the rest of the world holed up in their respective bedrooms, having the same experience. Before last Wednesday, I can't remember the last time I had that feeling. I also can't remember the last time I woke up voluntarily at 6 a.m. either, but like hundreds of thousands of other people around the world, there I was, sat at my computer, headphones on, groggy, but awake, and hitting play. Such a return to communal exchange isn't something you'd expect to be orchestrated by a band who's wrung beauty from alienation for more than a decade. But if the past few weeks have taught us anything, it's that Radiohead revel, above all else, in playing against type. It's written in their discography; excluding the conjoined twins that were Kid A and Amnesiac, each of their albums constitutes a heroic effort to debunk those that came before it. Although 2003's Hail to the Thief was overlong and scattershot, it was important insofar as it represented the full band's full-circle digestion and synthesis of the sounds and methods they first toyed with on OK Computer. So, after a decade of progression, where do we go from here? If the 2006 live renditions of their new material were anything to go by, not much further. With few exceptions, the roughly 15 songs introduced during last year's tour gave the impression that after five searching records, Radiohead had grown tired of trying to outrun themselves. Taken as a whole, the guitar-centric compositions offered a portrait of a band who, whether subconsciously or not, looked conciliatory for the first time in its career. Although a wonderful surprise, their early October album announcement only lent further credence to the theory. Where they'd previously had the confidence to precede albums like OK Computer and Kid A with marketing fanfare worthy of a classic-in-making, this sneak attack felt like a canny strategy to prepare fans for an inevitable downshift. The brilliant In Rainbows represents no such thing. Nonetheless, it's a very different kind of Radiohead record. Liberated from their self-imposed pressure to innovate, they sound-- for the first time in ages-- user-friendly; the glacial distance that characterized their previous records melted away by dollops of reverb, strings, and melody. From the inclusion and faithful rendering of longtime fan favorite "Nude" to the classic pop string accents on "Faust Arp" to the uncharacteristically relaxed "House of Cards", Radiohead's sudden willingness to embrace their capacity for uncomplicated beauty might be In Rainbows' most distinguishing quality, and one of the primary reasons it's an improvement on Hail to the Thief. Now that singer Thom Yorke has kickstarted a solo career-- providing a separate venue for the solo electronic material he used to shoehorn onto Radiohead albums-- Radiohead also sound like a full band again. Opener "15 Step"'s mulched-up drum intro represents the album's only dip into Kid A-style electronics; from the moment Jonny Greenwood's zestful guitar line takes over about 40 seconds in, In Rainbows becomes resolutely a five-man show. (For all of Yorke's lonely experimental pieces, it's easy to forget how remarkably the band play off each other; the rhythm section of Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood are especially incredible, supplying between them for a goldmine of one-off fills, accents, and runs over the course of the record.) A cut-up in the spirit of "Airbag"-- albeit with a jazzier, more fluid guitar line-- "15 Step" gives way to "Bodysnatchers", which, like much of In Rainbows, eschews verse/chorus/verse structure in favor of a gradual build. Structured around a sludgy riff, it skronks along noisily until about the two-minute mark, when the band veers left with a sudden acoustic interlude. By now, Radiohead are experts at tearing into the fabric of their own songs for added effect, and In Rainbows is awash in those moments. The band's big-hearted resurrection of "Nude" follows. The subject of fervent speculation for more than a decade, its keening melodies and immutable prettiness had left it languishing behind Kid A's front door. Despite seeming ambivalent about the song even after resurrecting it for last year's tour, this album version finds Yorke wrenching as much sweetness out of it as he possibly can, in turn giving us our first indication that he's in generous spirits. Another fan favorite, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" brandishes new drums behind its drain-circling arpeggios, but sounds every bit as massive in crescendoing as its live renditions suggested it might. "All I Need", meanwhile, concludes the album's first side by dressing up what begins as a skeletal rhythm section in cavernous swaths of glockenspiel, synths, pianos, and white noise. With its fingerpicked acoustic guitars and syrupy strings, "Faust Arp" begs comparisons to some of the Beatles' sweetest two-minute interludes, while the stunning "Reckoner" takes care of any lingering doubt about Radiohead's softer frame of mind: Once a violent rocker worthy of its title, this version finds Yorke's slinky, elongated falsetto backed by frosty, clanging percussion and a meandering guitar line, onto which the band pile a chorus of backing harmonies, pianos, and-- again-- swooping strings. It may not be the most immediate track on the album, but over the course of several listens, it reveals itself to be among the most woozily beautiful things the band has ever recorded. With its lethargic, chipped-at guitar chords, "House of Cards" is a slow, R.E.M.-shaped ballad pulled under by waves of reverbed feedback. While it's arguably the one weak link in the album's chain, it provides a perfect lead-in to the spry guitar workout of "Jigsaw Falling Into Place". Like "Bodysnatchers" and "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi" before it, "Jigsaw" begins briskly and builds into a breakneck conclusion, this time with Yorke upshifting from low to high register to supply a breathless closing rant. Finally, the closer. Another fan favorite, Yorke's solo versions of "Videotape" suggested another "Pyramid Song" in the making. Given the spirit of In Rainbows, you'd be forgiven for assuming its studio counterpart might comprise some sort of epic finale, but to the disappointment of fans, it wasn't to be. Instead, we get a circling piano coda and a bassline that seems to promise a climax that never comes. "This is one for the good days/ And I have it all here on red, blue, green," Yorke sings. It's an affecting sentiment that conjures up images of the lead singer, now a father of two, home filming his kids. A rickety drum beat and shuddering percussions work against the melody, trying clumsily to throw it off, but Yorke sings against it: "You are my center when I spin away/ Out of control on videotape." As the real life drums give way to a barely distinguishable electronic counterpart, Yorke trails off, his piano gently uncoils, and the song ends with a whimper. The whole thing is an extended metaphor, of course, and, this being Radiohead, it's heavy-handed in its way, but it's also a fitting close to such a human album. In the end, that which we feared came true: In Rainbows represents the sound of Radiohead coming back to earth. Luckily, as it turns out, that's nothing to be afraid of at all.

2007-10-15T02:00:01.000-04:00

2007-10-15T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

self-released / ATO

October 15, 2007

03dfafde-a4f5-47c4-8184-a8a1aae80255

Mark Pytlik

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/

The British punk-hop duo’s career-spanning collection shows their unlikely ascent from ranting on sidewalks to ranting at Brixton Academy.

The British punk-hop duo’s career-spanning collection shows their unlikely ascent from ranting on sidewalks to ranting at Brixton Academy.

Sleaford Mods: All That Glue

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sleaford-mods-all-that-glue/

All That Glue

The British punk-hop duo Sleaford Mods are really a trio: vocalist Jason Williamson, producer/professional button-pusher Andrew Fearn, and Williamson’s water bottle. Williamson doesn’t simply leave his Evian by his floor monitor in case he needs an occasional swig; it’s affixed to his left hand, the life force that allows him to shout himself hoarse for 60 minutes about how everything’s fooked. His desperate gulping forces you to contemplate the superhuman effort he puts into his bilious rants, and, as this new career-spanning collection affirms, the effect remains just as potent when you’re getting berated at home. It makes sense that one of Britain’s most breathless acts would want to push pause now and take a look back: 2019’s Eton Alive cracked the UK Top 10, capping the Mods’ unlikely ascent from playing on sidewalks to headlining Brixton Academy. All That Glue, which bypasses a number of crucial cuts, has no designs on being definitive. Rather, the compilation positions a handful of the Mods’ most popular songs (“Tied Up in Nottz,” “Fizzy,” “Tweet Tweet Tweet”) as familiar cross streets on a back-alley tour of non-album singles, cassette-only releases, alternate versions, and previously unreleased ephemera. Fortunately, with a band as lyrically and sonically crude as Sleaford Mods, there’s zero dissonance between their official and non-official output: All That Glue’s unearthed tracks easily punch as hard as their better-known counterparts, and each showcases Williamson’s bottomless reservoir of ways to vent spleen. The story of Sleaford Mods is, of course, inextricable from that of England itself over the past 10 years. Thanks to dole-line dispatches like “Jobseeker,” the group emerged as Britain’s preeminent punk-rock band for an austerity age where even the most basic punk-rock rudiments (electric guitars, amplifiers, drums) seem like unattainable luxuries, and where no one can afford to feed their families but there’s “digital time boards on the new public shitters.” Williamson’s lyrics provide grave diagnoses on multiple English societal sicknesses, including its rightward creep in the Brexit era; on “Rochester,” he recounts a confrontation with a “separatist pub racist.” And yet he also speaks to quandaries that resonate for listeners with no idea what the EDL or BHS is. On “TCR,” he’s just a forty-something dad trying to keep his cool when chaos reigns both inside and outside his household. On “Fat Tax,” Williamson grapples with the new reality of being a touring artist in middle age: “If I play another venue covered in stickers where everybody chain smokes, it’s so no no!” All That Glue’s chronological sequence emphasizes the most remarkable thing about Sleaford Mods’ improbable success—i.e., that their rising popularity has had negligible effect on their music. (To wit, even Mark E. Smith—who, by law, must make a cameo in every Sleaford Mods review—eventually moved onto congenial Kinks and Gene Vincent covers.) But its cherry-picked tracklist also provides a clearer picture of the duo’s incremental evolution. Sleaford Mods may never deign to write a proper pop song, but as the motorik punk of “Seconds” demonstrates, Williamson has become evermore adept at harnessing his rangy rants into accessible chants. And tellingly, they opt to close with two Eton Alive outliers—the clarinet-squawked “OBCT” and damn-near-balladic “When You Come Up to Me”—that suggest a band on the cusp of a greater transformation. On All That Glue’s opening track, “McFlurry,” Williamson repeatedly declares, “I’ve got a Brit Award” with copious snark. But by the end of the record, the joke doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-05-20T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Rough Trade

May 20, 2020

03e158a9-6720-46e9-b1f3-cfd7fc3504b5

Stuart Berman

https://pitchfork.com/staff/stuart-berman/

The second album from Tennessee songwriter Julien Baker wrestles with self-worth, rejection, and God. Centering on her voice, guitar, and piano, Baker begins to sound defiant.

The second album from Tennessee songwriter Julien Baker wrestles with self-worth, rejection, and God. Centering on her voice, guitar, and piano, Baker begins to sound defiant.

Julien Baker: Turn Out the Lights

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/julien-baker-turn-out-the-lights/

Turn Out the Lights

On “Claws in Your Back,” the last song on her second record Turn Out the Lights, Julien Baker pulls out the stopper from all the tension that’s mounted in her solo music to date. The Tennessee songwriter’s first album on Matador wrestles with many of the same demons that populated her chilling debut Sprained Ankle in 2015. In her cracked but steady voice, a voice trained on pop-punk in her band Forrister and later subdued to spare, acoustic rock, Baker appeals to God. She asks familiar questions: Am I enough? Do I deserve to be here? Will I ever be OK? In the album’s final moments, she at last settles on something like an answer. “I think I can love the sickness you made,” she sings. “I want it to stay.” She thunders out the last syllable in an unbridled belt, the kind that sparks full-body shivers no matter how fortified your guard may be. Her voice echoes into what sounds like a cavernous space, and then you hear her close the lid of the piano, the heavy work of catharsis behind her. If that “stay” stuns beyond anything Baker’s ever recorded, it’s only because she fought so hard to get there. The fragile, gentle songs on Sprained Ankle played like an open diary of mental illness and substance abuse, with an ember of faith flickering at its core. “There’s more whiskey than blood in my veins,” Baker sang over sparse piano chords on that album’s closer “Go Home,” “more tar than air in my lungs.” On Turn Out the Lights, Baker reckons with the ghosts that follow her even into sobriety. Though the album still centers on her voice, guitar, and piano, she’s got more company this time, both in the form of additional personnel (Sorority Noise’s Cameron Boucher plays woodwinds on “Appointments” and “Over,” and Camille Faulkner lends strings to five tracks) and new characters in the lyrics. The “you” Baker sings to is sometimes God, like before, but also sometimes a romantic partner or friend she feels she’s disappointing. Whomever she’s addressing in a given moment, she dreads their rejection constantly—even on the title track and “Shadowboxing,” where the only person she’s struggling with is herself. Baker often sounded defeated or apologetic on Sprained Ankle, couching her dejection in the language of physical injury—a metaphor she extends through “Televangelist” with the couplet, “I’m an amputee with a phantom touch/Leaning on an invisible crutch.” Elsewhere, though, she begins to sound defiant, as though with enough rage she could finally beat back her sadness. “The harder I swim, the faster I sink,” she repeats toward the end of “Sour Breath,” her voice building to a scream she throttles through a distorted microphone. On “Happy to Be Here,” she confronts her maker directly: “I was just wondering if there’s any way that you made a mistake… I heard there’s a fix for everything/Then why/Then why/Then why not me?” Her voice climbs each time she repeats the question, until it breaks and hangs in the air around her. By the end of the song, she ameliorates her frustration by opting to “grit my teeth and try to act deserving/When I know there is nowhere I can hide from your humiliating grace.” A direct thematic line runs from the album’s first full song, “Appointments,” to “Claws in Your Back”’s riveting finish. On “Appointments,” Baker grapples with the apparent futility of her strained optimism; at the song’s coda, her multi-tracked voice sings to itself, “Maybe it’s all gonna turn out alright/I know that it’s not/But I have to believe that it is/I have to believe that it is.” That innate contradiction, that faith against all reasonable odds, resonates behind the chain of confessions that follows. By the end of the album, she’s landed on another cluster of paradoxes: “I’m better off learning how to be/Living with demons I’ve/Mistaken for saints/If you keep it between us/I think they’re the same." The way she sings it, you’d believe she’s telling her secrets to you and you alone, all evidence to the contrary. You’d believe that loving your demons—not banishing them—might just be the secret to that evasive grace.

2017-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-10-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Matador

October 27, 2017

03e3c740-26a6-43b2-9c90-4247cbd2ef0a

Sasha Geffen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/

One of 90s R&B's leading lights makes a surprising, and rewarding, comeback on this, his first new album in eight years.

One of 90s R&B's leading lights makes a surprising, and rewarding, comeback on this, his first new album in eight years.

Maxwell: BLACKsummers'night

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13316-blacksummersnight/

BLACKsummers'night

Heartbreak is a constant in popular music, and with good reason; Maxwell is among the billions across the globe who have had their hearts broken at one time or another, but his latest record, BLACKsummers'night, is a deeply moving and evocative record that finds the singer expounding on this universal feeling like few can. The record misses frequent collaborator Stuart Matthewman and initially has an almost underwhelming live-performance feel when compared with his older records. But while it lacks the iconic significance of his debut, BLACKsummers'night is a record more than worthy of Maxwell's talents, because it trades the physical sensuality of his earlier work for a deep emotional resonance, the performance of an artist whose focus and attention to detail gives his expression a singular veracity. Maxwell's debut, Urban Hang Suite, is one of the top R&B records of the 1990s. Back then the young, precocious singer wielded an introverted, understated persona; he seemed to have a profound understanding of himself with a quiet-spoken reserve that, when blended with incredibly crafted songwriting, came across as confidence. Here was an artist who seemed to have shaped every chord change for maximum emotional effectiveness. Maxwell was also a performer who knew that songwriting was not simply writing melodies and chord progressions, but could be structurally ambitious, with the kind of consistent unpredictability and subversiveness of the song form, embracing the unexpected, like the sudden crash after the long pause in the middle of Urban Hang Suite's "Dancewitme". His latest record finds these kinds of details, this external, broad-perspective view of what "composition" really means, the love of intricacies, its best songs balancing compositional excellence, development, and tension, with carefully designed moods that reflect or complement each work's lyrical focus. Take "Help Somebody", for example: Maxwell begs the listener to show love, turning such feelings into a moral imperative, tension ratcheting with a gradual build, musically searching for release that never comes, a long hopeless cry to force logic to intrude over irrational feeling. Maxwell's power is least effective when he loses this composed structure; "Stop the World" reaches for raw, unrehearsed expression, but without organization, it feels listless. By contrast "Fistful of Tears" is anchored by a Prince-inflected quarter-note harmony waltz; not coincidentally, it's also the album's most immediately affecting track. Although Maxwell has always seemed preternaturally mature, there is something new here, a depth of emotion appropriate for this level of heartbreak. "Pretty Wings", the lead single and album centerpiece, doesn't work in simple binaries or reductive ideas; it lays out a fair yet confused examination of a relationship's fall. Maxwell even acknowledges his own mistakes after an indictment of his partner's, creating a realization of loss and all of the intricate personal responses that implies. But what is truly powerful is that it is just as musically complex as a relationship's disintegration is emotionally. Maxwell's patience allows him to effectively write such paens to devotion; it is as if he wanted to catalog every aspect of this very human breakdown, identify each strand to create a song that fully captures, laid bare, the complex emotional terrain that wells up during such an exceptionally difficult and human experience. This level of detail carries with it a lived-in feeling, a convincing truthfulness simply because the emotions are too specific to be anything but real. Music this effective is difficult, and only someone as passionate about music as they are the human heart could so successfully produce work that reflects well on both.

2009-07-10T02:00:01.000-04:00

2009-07-10T02:00:01.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Columbia

July 10, 2009

03e5d2a9-179d-42c3-8488-198471595b9d

David Drake

https://pitchfork.com/staff/david-drake/

Incorporating all of Odd Future's members with surprising ease (not an easy task considering all the stylistic differences at play), The OF Tape Vol. 2 is the first thing in well over a year that will remind people of why they liked the L.A. skate punks in the first place.

Incorporating all of Odd Future's members with surprising ease (not an easy task considering all the stylistic differences at play), The OF Tape Vol. 2 is the first thing in well over a year that will remind people of why they liked the L.A. skate punks in the first place.

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All: The OF Tape Vol. 2

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16421-the-of-tape-vol-2/

The OF Tape Vol. 2

"Rella" video: Hodgy Beats shoots lasers from his crotch that turn girls into cats, Domo Genesis smacks a black girl in the face and she turns Asian, Tyler as a coke-snorting centaur. "NY (Ned Flander)" video: Hodgy as a deadbeat dad preoccupied with softcore porn, Tyler's head on a baby's body. If you thought that one-two punch of videos for the lead singles from The OF Tape Vol. 2 was the beginning of the end for the notorious gang of L.A. skate punks, you weren't alone. Never mind that the songs were fine, but for a crew whose visuals were as important to their meteoric rise as their music (if not more), those big-budget videos suggested Tyler and the rest of Odd Future had forgotten why they became such a big deal. Both clips try to get over on low-level shock value, but in playing up their propensity to rankle casual onlookers, the group overlooked that they became a sensation first and foremost because of their dynamic and unique chemistry. Their insularity and aura is what draws people to them and that was wiped away by sterile video sets and CGI. "Oldie" video: While at a Terry Richardson photo shoot, the entire Wolf Gang stages an impromptu video, reciting their verses from the album's closing track. They interrupt each other, bust each other's balls, play hypeman for each other, and laugh and smile a hell of a lot. Its lo-fi spontaneity is as close as we've gotten to the group's early videos, and it looks like the most fun you could have on any given day. This is no coincidence. The energy and camaraderie that ignites the video is the purest distillation of Odd Future's accidental genius, and after a year-plus of overwrought attempts to continually up the shock level, it's a much-needed breath of fresh air. This is great news, but even better is that The OF Tape Vol. 2 as a whole shares more with the "Oldie" video than the other two. The tape incorporates all of Odd Future's members with surprising ease (not an easy task considering all the stylistic differences at play) and pieces together the first release in over a year that'll remind people why they liked the group so much in the first place. Part of it is just mathematical. Contributions here are less than any one person would put into a solo album, and though that simple formula doesn't always equal success when it comes to group records, every member here benefits from the arrangement. For guys like Hodgy and Domo, there's barely any room for filler lines (let alone filler verses), and that helps mask their lesser-developed personas. As for Tyler, well, at the moment, less Tyler is better than more Tyler. His presence still dominates the album, but his charms are more apparent and his abrasiveness is easier to digest than on Goblin. Those three show up on nearly half of these tracks, and that's crucial to the album's success since any combination of the three works well together. This is often thanks to Hodgy, whose versatility finds him just as comfortable turning up the aggression with Tyler on "NY (Ned Flander)" as he is trading verbal workouts with Domo on "Bitches" for style points. But the album is a success mainly because everyone simply steps it up. Domo in particular seems to have evolved from the group's bumbling stoner into a guy who can spit dizzying, complicated verses. Even the peripheral members manage to hit it out of the park when given their turns: Mike G's "Forest Green" has been out for close to a year, but its inclusion here is obvious and deserved. Syd has show-stopping turns as a singer at the end of "Analog 2" and on the Internet's "Ya Know", the latter being a more successful take on the sort of lounge-soul that Pharrell used to awkwardly dabble in. Frank Ocean swings by for a few hooks plus "White", his lone solo contribution, which will add Stevie Wonder to the list of classic singers he's usually compared to. Even "We Got Bitches", Tyler, Jasper, and Taco's second stab at an affectionate Waka parody, is almost good enough to make up for Goblin's "Bitch Suck Dick". Which brings us back to "Oldie". The 10-minute-plus track closes an album that's probably too long in the first place, and in theory it borders on overkill. But it's a reminder that when you strip away all the noise, there's just a group of rappers here, and pretty good ones at that. Maybe it's also a reminder to Odd Future that their skills can allow them to stand on their own, teen dreams of wild music videos be damned. Oh, and the return of Earl Sweatshirt doesn't hurt either.

2012-03-22T02:00:00.000-04:00

2012-03-22T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Odd Future

March 22, 2012

03ea0b65-27c4-4ff9-b4b3-0ea74fc785b1

Jordan Sargent

https://pitchfork.com/staff/jordan-sargent/

The debut album from Spillage Village founders Olu and WowGr8 is a whimsical, theatrical attempt to capture the inexhaustible magic of Atlanta.

The debut album from Spillage Village founders Olu and WowGr8 is a whimsical, theatrical attempt to capture the inexhaustible magic of Atlanta.

EarthGang: Mirrorland

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earthgang-mirrorland/

Mirrorland

One of the most impressive feats of Donald Glover’s surrealist FX show Atlanta is how it captures the sheer multiplicity of the city’s many characters. The dope dealer turned rising rapper is managed by his homeless Princeton dropout cousin, whose Afro-German girlfriend is a grade-school science teacher with a homegirl who scams pro athletes; it’s on and on like that down to the most minor roles. Atlanta has often been dubbed Black Mecca, in part for the wide swath of black identities it fosters. Among the inheritors of this broad lineage is EarthGang, an ATL duo comprised of rappers Olu (also known as Johnny Venus) and WowGr8 (also known as Doctur Dot), founders of the wide-ranging Spillage Village collective that includes J.I.D., 6LACK, Mereba, Lute, and more. Their debut album, Mirrorland, released on the heels of their Dreamville label’s touted compilation Revenge of the Dreamers III, longs to be a black world unto itself. Mirrorland was inspired by The Wiz, the all-black 1978 adaptation of The Wizard of Oz featuring music produced by Quincy Jones for Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Lena Horne. “Atlanta is the Land of Oz,” Olu said in July. “It’s black people just being unafraid and unapologetically creative. Just running around being themselves.” The album certainly has the whimsy and spectacle of a musical, and it’s clear Olu and WowGr8 consider themselves unapologetically creative, too, but there is the sense that this is less about them and more about honoring that down-home creative spark. There is a theatricality to the music, as if they are donning personas and performing bits, paying homage to the many types of people they encounter and the place that produces them. The scope of Mirrorland is wide enough to capture the inexhaustible magic of Atlanta. The songs on Mirrorland are clear attempts to chart the city’s diverse sound. They are rich and constantly shifting and evolving. Produced by Olu, Elite, DJ Dahi, Bink!, Childish Major, and others, this is EarthGang’s most complete record and their most unpredictable one. It is as captivating as it is unusual. When the songs don’t erupt into full-on parades like the groovy hoodoo opener “LaLa Challenge,” they split open into alternate arrangements, like “This Side,” its rippling synths receding to uncover slapping drum programming. The album can swing from funk-rap to trap so quickly that it almost inherently reveals how these styles trace back to the same roots. The shifts are anchored by the two rappers, who dictate the flow with their larger-than-life styles and their flamboyant execution. Some of that performance is at the expense of more personal songwriting. There’s nothing as reflective as the songs on their EP trilogy, Rags, Robots, and Royalty. In place of rapping that communicates more of their individual identities, madcap demonstration takes the fore. Both Olu and WowGr8 can rattle off semi-automatic raps or bellow tuneful chants, or even fuse the two together, as they do on “Top Down.” Olu leans into the cartoonishness of his voice a bit more, while WowGr8 has the conversational tone of a rambler. Both are prone to breaking out into song at any moment, channeling gospel soul or freaky country-fried blues. Their eclecticism and their risk-taking ways are indebted to OutKast; their music, less so. It’s a comparison they’ve gotten almost constantly, and an unfair one, really. They aren’t the rappers André and Big Boi are, nor are they the storytellers. Their relationship to one another is a parallel, oddball to oddball, as opposed to free spirit to pragmatist. Big Boi kept André weighted to the ground; neither here is a tether to Earth, so there’s nothing preventing them both from drifting out into space. But it’s better for them this way. No one can be OutKast, and EarthGang’s unrestrained looseness gives them free rein to do and try just about anything. The ideas sprawled across Mirrorland are mostly in service of songcraft, adding color and texture to their vibrant visions of a super-black Emerald City. It’s Atlanta rap fantasia, manifold in form and style, each track a new, distinctive set design in the production. There’s the trumpeting Afrobeat sashay of “Tequila,” the throwback neo-soul of “Blue Moon,” the out-there BTG-ish balladry of “Proud of U” (with Young Thug in tow). The songs aren’t necessarily about anything in particular, and none of the writing really grabs you, though it does usually contain kernels of insight (“Nigga that you hatin’ on probably got something he could teach your corny ass/While you in the corner grindin’ teeth,” WowGr8 raps on “Avenue”). The album works because of its holism, the sense that its songs make up an entire picture. “Cinematic” is a word they’ve used to describe Mirrorland, but EarthGang’s album isn’t 2D, it’s multidimensional—a marauder’s map of Atlanta as a black paradise.

2019-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-09-14T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Dreamville / Interscope

September 14, 2019

03ecb29b-110a-4b68-aa73-27dec615ec2a

Sheldon Pearce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/

Myrkur steps confidently from the shadows on M, the full-length debut from the polarizing black metal project of Danish singer and bandleader Amalie Bruun.

Myrkur steps confidently from the shadows on M, the full-length debut from the polarizing black metal project of Danish singer and bandleader Amalie Bruun.

Myrkur: M

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20833-m/

M

Myrkur steps confidently from the shadows on M, the full-length debut from the polarizing black metal project of Danish singer and bandleader Amalie Bruun. Late in 2014, Myrkur emerged with a self-titled debut EP clouded in and catapulted by mystery. Hyperbolically billed by Relapse Records as "a wholly unique perspective on the genre," the seven songs webbed haunting, seraphic singing around tremolo guitars and primitive, rumbling drums. The conceit was intriguing, but the songs were unevenly built, with parts that never quite became a complete puzzle and a force that felt mitigated by some sycophantic need for second-wave credibility. Still, even (especially?) people who dismissed the songs demanded to know just who the unnamed creator of the one-woman black metal band was, a process that begot pernicious conspiracy theories and comment threads devoted to ferretting out the singer and connections that would make her a little less kvlt. Bruun, indeed, had worked as a pop singer and half of an indie rock band signed to Fat Possum, biographical talking points that inspired ire. Days before the EP arrived, Relapse confirmed that Mykur did, indeed, belong to Bruun, setting off another wave of debate about whether or not the anonymity had been a mere promotional ploy. The hubbub was more interesting and accomplished than the music that inspired it, a distraction from the real reason anyone should or should not have been talking about Myrkur. But on M, Bruun is free and clear of any identity drama—and a much more convincing bandleader for it. Myrkur’s animating idea remains much the same on M: Add Bruun’s beautiful voice to brutal metal outbursts, and offset serrated black metal screams with contemplative piano or vocal interludes. This time, though, Bruun has sealed many of the foundational cracks in her compositions and owned the audacity of the project and the form at large. She recruited Ulver mastermind Garm as the co-producer, alongside a rhythm section comprising members of Mayhem and Nidingr and a cadre of horns and stringed instruments endemic to Norway and Iceland. They reinforce these songs, adding flourishes that are both striking and subtle and delivering an instrumental aplomb that Myrkur initially avoided. These songs feel unabashed and fully rendered, neither limited by the codex of a hidebound genre or hindered by the need to prove too much at once. Rather than recede from public view following a sometimes-uncomfortable start, Bruun has pushed Myrkur into the spotlight of big, bright production—a kiss-off to cynical kvlt critics that doubles as a convenient invitation of accessibility. On Myrkur, the relationship between the songs’ varied aspects—the choral singing, the piano pieces, the relentless browbeaters—seemed casual at best, facets of a project that Bruun had not yet fit together. But M works as an album of interconnected miniature arcs, with many songs following the same structure. Bruun flexes here, too: In the past, and throughout much of M, she has meted out her harsh vocals, judiciously scattering them for dramatic emphasis or as textural undercurrents. But on "Mordet", the most direct evidence of her increased ambition, she foregoes clean vocals altogether for the first time in her catalog. Her grim voice webbed with echo, she sounds as though she’s hunting an evil tail through the search-and-destroy maze of guitars, drums, and noise. If only for four minutes, she escapes her predictable comfort zone of hard-and-soft counterbalance, becoming the heavy metal force that her past has only suggested. At its most compelling, black metal pits the impossible grandeur of the world against its harsh natural realities. It’s a big, vivid vision, where battles between heroes and villains, the dark and the light, the past and the present come into ecstatic conflict. It’s become so stylized and specific, though, that some of that spirit can often be lost in rote genre exercises or aggressively experimental attempts to re-contextualize it. From the start, it was clear that Myrkur wanted to recapture the essence of those competing forces and the tension they produced. That prospect was always more enticing than who she was or who she wasn’t. At last, Myrkur’s music has started to bear out that promise and to rise above the gossip about her pedigree.

2015-08-31T02:00:04.000-04:00

2015-08-31T02:00:04.000-04:00

Metal

Relapse

August 31, 2015

03f4de2d-fda8-483b-b879-835aa265c00e

Grayson Haver Currin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/grayson-haver currin/

Maybe you've heard of this one? This meeting of two long-reigning titans is the kind of stadium-sized event-rap spectacle we don't get often enough.

Maybe you've heard of this one? This meeting of two long-reigning titans is the kind of stadium-sized event-rap spectacle we don't get often enough.

Jay-Z / Kanye West: Watch the Throne

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15725-watch-the-throne/

Watch the Throne

Watch the Throne features the following things: absurdly expensive samples, a pair of choruses from Odd Future R&B singer Frank Ocean at the exact moment where he's turning the corner and becoming a Thing, another chorus from long-been-a-Thing Beyoncé, a buddy-buddy shoutout to the President of the United States, multiple namechecks of brands so expensive that you've probably never heard of half of them, a murderers' row of producers working on almost every track, and a fleeting moment where Bon Iver's Justin Vernon sounds like the funkiest man alive. And yet for Jay-Z and Kanye West, this could actually be viewed as a relatively minor album. Amazing. The album comes hot on the heels of career-landmark albums from both artists, but the few months they spent recording it on multiple continents were practically vacations compared to the way they usually work. Kanye's opus My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, still less than a year old, won across-the-board critical raves for its lush, prog-rap expansiveness; to create it, Kanye sequestered himself in Hawaii and flew in an endless stream of creative-peak collaborators. Jay, meanwhile, is still cruising on the momentum of The Blueprint 3, an artistically flat but commercially massive grab for continued relevance that did everything he wanted it to do. Watch the Throne brings little of Twisted Fantasy's boundary-melting ambition or The Blueprint 3's commercial acumen. It's just two of rap's biggest figures and best friends getting together to make some of the swollen, epic music that comes so naturally to them. Listening to it is sort of like watching George Clooney get all his movie-star friends together for a party at his Italian villa, and, along the way, maybe dream up Ocean's Twelve. (I liked Ocean's Twelve.) In the past week, Internet sleuths have pointed out that the release of many Jay-Z albums have coincided with some national or international calamity, 9/11 not excluded. Watch the Throne is no exception: its release on the same day as yet another catastrophic stock market downturn has led some critics to conclude that the pair's boasts of obscene wealth is out of step with the times. That's a fair case to make. But one of the striking things about Watch the Throne is how often Jay and Kanye address matters beyond their bank accounts. On "Why I Love You", it's Jay's dismay at past crewmates' betrayals. On "Murder to Excellence", it's black-on-black crime and the scarcity of people of color at society's highest seats. On "Made in America", it's the hardships of youth and coming of age. "New Day" is framed as a letter to the pair's imagined sons, a device that mostly gives them a chance to soul-search and self-criticize. On "Welcome to the Jungle", Jay, never a tortured pop star, actually says, "I'm fuckin' depressed." Despite all the triumphant bravado these two bring to practically everything they do, they work overtime here to bring a sense of empathy to this enterprise. Once in a while, they even sound vaguely humble. These subtler moments are admirable, but they don't always work. Consider, for example, the song "That's My Bitch", on which Kanye and his collaborators flip the classic "Apache" break into a devastating dance-rap monster with synths zooming off in every direction and Justin Vernon making the aforementioned sweaty soul moves. It's a vicious song, catchy as fuck, but it turns out to be weirdly awkward. Despite the title, Jay's verse is all devotional-prophet; it mostly concerns the way American beauty standards so often work against women of color. The sentiment deserves respect, but his laidback delivery, on a track with production and structure that call for ferocity, drains his ideas of force. Watch the Throne works best when Jay and Kanye are just talking about how great they are. The single "Otis" is dizzy fun, with Jay and Kanye rapping hard and swapping mics like hungry kids. "Niggas in Paris" rides an impossibly propulsive synth riff and gigantic drums and gives Jay a chance to display the technical rap wizardry he still has in him. (It also features this great Kanye moment, "Doctors say I'm the illest because I'm suffering from realness/ Got my niggas in Paris, and they going gorillas," followed by a sample of Will Ferrell in Blades of Glory talking about how awesome shit doesn't have to mean anything.) "Gotta Have It" unites Kanye and the Neptunes to crazily chop up James Brown vocal samples and Eastern flute melodies. And "Who Gon Stop Me" finds Kanye cussing in Pig Latin while turning dubstep-rap into a viable subgenre. If you buy Watch the Throne from iTunes-- the only place you can buy it at the moment-- you'll notice that it's credited to "JAY Z & Kanye West" (capital letters and missing hyphen unexplained). But while Jay might be billed first for seniority's sake, Kanye is this album's obvious guiding force. Throughout, he displays levels of unequaled audacity. On "Otis" and "Gotta Have It", he reduces Otis Redding and James Brown to simple grunts, then builds rhythm tracks out of them. On "New Day", over a beat co-produced by RZA, he actually runs Nina Simone through Auto-Tune. On "No Church in the Wild", he authoritatively vows, "You will not control the threesome." The musical scope of Watch the Throne is a tribute to his distinctive taste and sense of style. The whole thing sounds huge, and even the sillier moments ("Made in America", especially, reminds me of the inspirational ballads of late-period Michael Jackson) succeed on pure orchestral excess. Jay and Kanye debuted the album in a private listening session at a New York planetarium, a setting which made perfect sense: even if it never approaches the grandeur or character-study complexity of Twisted Fantasy, this is still exploding-star music. So: two long-reigning titans make a relatively quick album which, despite their best efforts, still winds up being a monument to their own grandiosity. Should we care? Well, yeah. Kanye doesn't have a cruise-control switch, and when he's around, neither does Jay. On Watch the Throne, they push each other and have fun doing it, and the result is a stadium-sized event-rap spectacle that still sounds like two insanely talented guys' idiosyncratic vision. That's worth celebrating.

2011-08-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

2011-08-11T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Def Jam / Roc-A-Fella / Roc Nation

August 11, 2011

03f4ef2d-1ba4-41b5-8283-d0ae94ba6473

Tom Breihan

https://pitchfork.com/staff/tom-breihan/

Composer and songwriter Jherek Bischoff's third record is an oceanic song cycle that encourages listeners to drop down into their own mind, a safe space in the dark where they are comfortably alone.

Composer and songwriter Jherek Bischoff's third record is an oceanic song cycle that encourages listeners to drop down into their own mind, a safe space in the dark where they are comfortably alone.

Jherek Bischoff: Cistern

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22176-cistern/

Cistern

There’s a meditation on seclusion buried inside of Cistern, composer and songwriter Jherek Bischoff’s third full-length recording under his own name.The record takes its title and theme from an empty, two-million gallon water tank in Washington that Bischoff found during an artist residency. The time he spent in the darkness improvising with the space’s long reverb decay (“You snap your fingers and the sound lasts for 45 seconds!” Bischoff enthuses in his Kickstarter video) formed what would eventually become Cistern, and left him thinking about his teenage years, when Bischoff’s family sailed for South America on a tiny sailboat. And if one looks at it this way, Cistern is an oceanic record, with the same pomp and violence that  runs through an orchestral piece like Debussy’s La Mer. Claude Debussy hated the idea that music must tell a story, preferring instead to simply suggest images. Bischoff, on the other hand, once said in an interview that when he thinks of classical music, he thinks of the sweeping orchestras of old Hollywood soundtracks. Much of the music on Cistern is proudly cinematic. There’s a thrill in the creep of “The Wolf,” and in the intrigue-filled strains of “Closer to Closure.” The wailing violin deep in the distance on “Headless” mixes with forlorn strings and might stir post-rock fans’ memories of Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s F#A#Infinity. Yet*,* when the song finally blossoms, it’s a small whimper of waves crashing against a rocky shore. Cistern is unlike many popular ambient classical recordings, which strive to be uninterrupted and nonintrusive. Bischoff loves cacophony, and the record is accordingly difficult to settle into—nowhere ever feels like the “right” space to reflect on its sounds. Just when the music finds a repeated pattern, a shrill flute or violin cuts across the landscape, disrupting the sense of narcotic sleepiness that often defines post-minimalist music. Bischoff is not a traditional composer, but is mostly self-taught. He’s arranged, composed and played for that loose association of weirdo pop musicians centered in the Pacific Northwest, like Parenthetical Girls and Xiu Xiu. Twice this year he’s collaborated with Amanda Palmer (in whose Grand Theft Orchestra he once played) to produce tributes to David Bowie and Prince. He took advantage of some of these connections in 2012 to release an album of orchestral songs with a wide cast of guests*.* Cistern is not a far departure from the chamber pop of Composed at first glance. Like its older sibling, the songs on Cistern exist independently of each other. The nine tracks feel connected only by the fact that they share the same space on record, more like a collection of long takes rather than a movie*.* It feels important to note that these scenes are almost always depopulated, except for “Attuna,” which leaves just enough room for two people in love. Again, they are in nature, under the stars in Maine (but they could just as easily be asleep in an apartment in Boston). These sketches encourage the listener to drop down into the cistern of their own mind, a safe space in the dark where they are comfortably alone. At its best, Cistern is a reflection of that secret place of contemplation. At a performance in April, while preparing to play the sleepy album-closer “The Sea’s Son,” Bischoff explained to the audience the empty water tank, its 45-second delay, and then he said quietly, “Now, Mr. Sound Guy, if you could please put us in the tank.”

2016-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-07-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

The Leaf Label

July 23, 2016

03f69171-1938-4ba2-bc84-c64372d7b64a

Brendan Mattox

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brendan-mattox/

This is not the new Daft Punk album. It's a score for a Disney franchise film.

This is not the new Daft Punk album. It's a score for a Disney franchise film.

Daft Punk: Tron: Legacy OST

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14938-tron-legacy-ost/

Tron: Legacy OST

This is not the new Daft Punk album. It's a score for a Disney franchise film that cost an estimated $200 million to make. As such, there are lots of classical-inspired strings and horns played by an 85-strong orchestra. Most of the soundtrack's 22 pieces don't last more than three minutes; only a few could be considered actual songs. And while we knew this was going to be a score since it was first reported nearly two years ago, it's tough to shake the gloom of blown expectations while listening to the same ominous theme as it repeats in slightly mutated forms across the hour-long soundtrack. The French duo's current move is almost undeniably disappointing, but it's also not a surprise. Daft Punk aren't the same two guys who made Homework and Discovery. Over the course of the last decade, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter have increasingly relied on images to complement-- and sometimes justify-- their music. Since their last proper LP, 2005's Human After All, the pair staged the greatest dance music tour of all time-- one that blasted its audience with enough visual stimuli to leave them blinking stars for hours. The pyramid, the gleaming helmets, and the lite-bright leather jackets brought Daft Punk's greatest hits to a holy, undiscovered realm. Their 2006 art-house indulgence Electroma went even further as it was directed by the twosome yet featured no new music. Daft Punk haven't even attempted a can't-miss song in at least five years, and the Tron: Legacy soundtrack keeps that unfortunate streak alive. The score keeps another trend going, too. Bangalter and de Homem-Christo have flexed their robot obsession for years, but its nature has changed. On Discovery tracks like "Digital Love", "Something About Us", and "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", they employed robotic voice effects to bring out the childlike naïveté of artificial intelligence. And Discovery's accompanying animated movie, Interstella 5555, was a bright and fun technicolor cartoon. But their mechanized fantasies have gotten continually darker since then-- consider the much more sinister robo effects on Human After All's "The Brainwasher" and "Television Rules the Nation". Electroma's two metal-machine leads commit harrowing self-destruct suicides. Most of the robot doomsaying can't compare with their ebullient side; their apocalyptic visions are hardly Philip K. Dick-worthy, and they're oftentimes a huge bummer to boot. Tron: Legacy is rated PG and aimed at igniting the imaginations of 10-year-old boys. When I watched it in IMAX 3D it was easy to revert back to my younger self and just gawk at the exquisite whiz-bang of it all. That said, it's pretty fucking dark. Most of the movie takes place in a virtual world that doesn't know sunlight-- it's like a futuristic version of Tolkien's Mordor. Almost all of the post-Han Solo humor that buoyed the original Tron is replaced by a thunderous seriousness (and blue-black color scheme) more akin to The Dark Knight. And the music follows suit with endless crescendos of pounding timpani drums and monolithic strings. Naturally, the music synchs a hell of a lot better when you're watching the stunning images it was made to accompany. Daft Punk's score plays a vital role in making this poorly scripted mega movie seem bigger and more important than it actually is. Even so, it hems frustratingly close to the sweeping classical film music style pioneered by John Williams (Star Wars) and picked up by Howard Shore (The Lord of the Rings) and Hans Zimmer (The Dark Knight). The Tron: Legacy score's supposed innovation is combining an orchestra style with electronics, but the meshing of the two styles is rare and rudimentary. More often than not, each piece is either mostly synth-based (including filter-house also-rans "Derezzed" and "Tron Legacy (End Titles)") or symphonic ("Nocturne", "Outlands"). When they pull off the combo-- as on the blistering "The Game Has Changed"-- it's thrilling even without an IMAX screen hijacking your senses. And while the classical arrangements mark a new style for Daft Punk, it's hardly revelatory in the sphere of movie scores at large. Watching the movie, I couldn't help but think that this was Daft Punk's attempt at topping their legendary pyramid tour. Theoretically, by teaming up with Disney and the most high-tech cameras and surround-sound systems and recording facilities known to man, the two could could dive bomb into the minds of millions of people in one immense opening weekend and stay consistent with their man vs. machine ideology-- all without leaving the comfort of their own homes. But the tour was phenomenal because they were the central characters-- not just a side act-- and because it was delusionally fun. Tron: Legacy has flashes of that sort of brilliance, but it's downright puny compared to the sheer joy that is "One More Time" or "Around the World". Daft Punk used to be a couple of guys hellbent on making genius dance music who happened to wear goofy robot helmets. Along the way, though, their priorities seem to have changed.

2010-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

2010-12-10T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Walt Disney

December 10, 2010

03f7df26-af62-4c56-a3e8-36179f5a4c64

Ryan Dombal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/

Playing a baby grand piano, Mike Milosh’s eight-song album reflects a sense of ritualistic quiet; it’s intimate without being heavy-handed.

Playing a baby grand piano, Mike Milosh’s eight-song album reflects a sense of ritualistic quiet; it’s intimate without being heavy-handed.

Rhye: Spirit

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/rhye-spirit/

Spirit

Rhye, the soft-pop group led by Mike Milosh, refurbished their sound last year on second album Blood to mixed results. Without producer Robin Hannibal, who fleshed out the group’s 2013 debut with minimalist, sumptuous production, Milosh leaned on beefier instrumentation and overstated lyrics that sapped most of the enigmatic, economical appeal from their music. Rhye’s new EP Spirit, recorded after an extensive tour last summer, feels like a loose, low-stakes companion to Blood. Rhye’s usual electronic and guitar stylings are stripped back to meditative piano arrangements and ambient mood-setting, making for an effective if lightweight backdrop for his sighing variety of romance. Milosh put Spirit together after being gifted a baby grand piano by his girlfriend, using daily exercises as a form of meditation following a draining tour schedule. The brief eight-song album reflects that sense of introspection and ritualistic quiet, with most songs resting in minor key and Milosh’s hazy timbre offering up long, wordless hums. Rhye has used chamber music as an indirect influence in the past, whether stacking harmonies over a horn section on “Woman” or adding plucked strings to their cover of Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” But here Milosh mostly dresses things down to an intentionally spare, percussive base; his piano is close-mic’d alongside the slightest brushes of synths and strings, signaling intimacy without the heavy-handedness that dragged down Blood. Lyrically, Milosh remains exclusively concerned with a tortured type of desire: He wants to be needed, feel your pain, wage your wars, et cetera. Delivered in a smooth, unified whisper, the words of affection sometimes sound vaguely sinister rather than sexy, as on “Needed,” written and produced with former Semisonic singer Dan Wilson: “Why you look so fragile? Do I seem so bad?/Oh, you look so pretty, there’s no devils here.” The song hinges on even clumsier phrasing during its chorus (“I wanna be needed, that’s what I need”) that undercuts all the feverish desire lurking at its core. Elsewhere, Icelandic composer Ólafur Arnalds adds his minimalist touch to the simmering, hymn-like standout “Patience,” while Milosh lets his piano do the legwork on muted instrumental trifles “Malibu Nights” and “Green Eyes.” It all feels a little perfunctory for Rhye at this point, but in a characteristically refined way that at least makes for easy casual listening. Spirit boils down the seductive essence of Rhye’s music to core elements. It would do well as an introduction to the group for an unfamiliar listener, but doesn’t feel necessary by any means. If anything, Spirit comes across as more mood music by design, bespoke and undemanding, and it probably already has real estate on every bedroom-themed playlist on Spotify. Rhye is now a reliably polished provider of this style of music, but it’s a position that clearly doesn’t allow for very many risks.

2019-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-05-18T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Loma Vista

May 18, 2019

03f89fd1-cd7d-42f3-88f4-62b01fe70f0e

Eric Torres

https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-torres/

Dialing back some of their eccentricities and embracing personal songwriting, Hot Chip have crafted their most consistent album yet.

Dialing back some of their eccentricities and embracing personal songwriting, Hot Chip have crafted their most consistent album yet.

Hot Chip: One Life Stand

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/13908-one-life-stand/

One Life Stand

Ever since Hot Chip started as indie kids seemingly dabbling in classic soul and modern R&B, they've been underestimated (not least of which by us). Delivering lines about "20-inch rims" and "Yo La Tengo" in a proper English accent, as they did on their 2005 debut, can have that effect. Yet on their two subsequent records-- 2006's The Warning and 2008's Made in the Dark-- Hot Chip steadily rebuilt their reputation by toughening up their sophistipop side. Their melodies began to develop an itchy, nervous twitch, and they earned dancefloor credibility through an association with DFA. Best of all, Hot Chip crafted some of the sneakiest and most effective earworms around-- songs that seem deceptively simple and assuming on first listen became year-end list locks by listen number 10. Their quirky detours, winks, and nods were no longer Prince and Stevie Wonder shoutouts; instead, they were subtler, so the band that initially came across as affable goofballs eventually revealed themselves to be the smartest guys in the room. In short, after a half-decade of having our expectations challenged and any hesitations about them erased, it finally felt like we knew who Hot Chip were. But their fourth album, One Life Stand, changes things a bit. After dialing back some of their eccentricities, their latest feels if anything even more likely to be underestimated. Oddly, this is arguably their best record yet. Whether you'll agree will depend on what you want from Hot Chip and what you want from an album. One Life Stand is their most consistent and most complete record, but it's missing an A-list single on par with "Boy From School", "Over and Over", or "Ready for the Floor". It's also missing dance songs in the mode of the latter two, focusing instead on Hot Chip at their most lush and romantic. Some will claim it's them growing up, but that's not true-- they've always exhibited panache and sophistication. This is simply the first time since their debut that they've primarily honed in on those sensibilities, in the process revealing just how far they've come sonically in the past five years. It's a bold move but well earned. The band's split personality was in full effect on Made in the Dark, which flitted between heart-on-sleeve songs like "We're Looking for a Lot of Love" and "One Pure Thought" and nebbishy hip-shakers like "Shake a Fist" and "Bendable Poseable". If you wanted a record of the former without the latter, well you're in luck, because that's basically what you have here. As Pitchfork's Ryan Dombal pointed out to me, it's a move akin to the one Pet Shop Boys took circa Behaviour-- a near-shedding of their more overt disco and house influences and an embrace of personal songwriting free of irony or distance. Because the songs not only share mood and tone but also are generally of the same high quality, One Life Stand has a sense of consistency and completeness missing from their other records, too. At its most basic, One Life Stand is a record of love songs; more specifically, it's often a record of self-actualization and redemption-- of recognizing our need for real human connection. Whether about romance or friendship, the songs on One Life Stand are often about commitment (as the album title indicates) and reciprocal relationships. These qualities aren't typically celebrated in pop culture-- stable monogamy and sensitive male bonding don't have the inherent drama of a star-crossed, fleeting, or unrequited love, after all. And yet Hot Chip locate the beauty and power in commitment and in stability. Fully two-thirds of the record is built upon proclamations of long-lasting love, which is made clear in many of the record's key lyrics: "You are my love light," "I only wanna be your one life stand," "Please take my heart and keep it close to you," "Happiness is what we all want," "I only want one life together in our arms." If that seems like a sort of bait and switch, then you've really underestimated Hot Chip, because they've been trading in this sort of sincerity for years. On the one hand, between their inauspicious start, geek-chic dancefloor excursions, and videos, Hot Chip can be viewed as wired, robotic, almost anti-human. Yet Hot Chip have functioned as sort of a mirror image of intelligent, dryly confessional 1980s bands like ABC and the Pet Shop Boys: Whereas lyricists like Martin Fry and Neil Tennant smuggled cynicism into the Top 40, Hot Chip sneak sincerity into an indie electro-pop scene dominated at times by the dress-up of blog-house. Perhaps it's no coincidence then that the best of their peers-- electro-soul brothers-in-arms Junior Boys and big-room dance stars Justice-- are also so straight-faced that people also assumed at first they were each a put-on. And each of the three is far outstripping those chasing fads. (Hey, where's that Uffie record we've been "promised"?) Weirdly, the songs here most likely to turn people off aren't the odes to everlasting love, but those explicitly about the importance of male connection ("Brothers") or the quest for spiritual guidance ("Slush"). And yet these are the record's twin centerpieces. Neither is as embraceable as singles and potential singles "One Life Stand", "Take It In", "Hand Me Down Your Love", or "I Feel Better", but they're the tracks that elevate the record from a collection of very good songs to a complete picture of an important band near the peak of its powers. Whether Hot Chip now stay in this headspace and sonic range-- perhaps there is a record full of nervy, upbeat and/or more tongue-in-cheek songs á la "The Warning" or "Wrestler" next-- won't obscure the risk they've taken here by fully embracing big-hearted electro-pop. And it won't obscure how successfully they've done it either.

2010-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00

2010-02-08T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Astralwerks

February 8, 2010

03f98bea-c998-441e-aaa3-9e9a7fcf1bb5

Scott Plagenhoef

https://pitchfork.com/staff/scott-plagenhoef/

The London rapper’s second album is smoother, preciser, and more measured. We see J Hus as a lost son of Gambia, an adult-in-progress, a talented pop polymath, and just a guy who has a lot of sex.

The London rapper’s second album is smoother, preciser, and more measured. We see J Hus as a lost son of Gambia, an adult-in-progress, a talented pop polymath, and just a guy who has a lot of sex.

J Hus: Big Conspiracy

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/j-hus-big-conspiracy/

Big Conspiracy

J Hus’ conservative detractors believe he and his music play an outsized role in the UK’s so-called knife crisis. In December 2018, the London rapper was sentenced to eight months in prison after being arrested for carrying a knife at a local shopping center, his third arrest for carrying a knife or being involved in knife fights. When he was stabbed in 2015, he was criticized for making gang signs in his hospital bed and glorifying violence. “They wanna judge me from what they heard I do/It’s a big conspiracy,” he sings sarcastically on his sophomore album’s title track. He seems to embrace the role of the anti-hero, but only on the condition that the nation recognizes its own role in shaping him. Improving upon his more eclectic debut, Common Sense, Big Conspiracy is smoother, preciser, and more measured. Common Sense showcased his working knowledge of road rap, Afropop, reggae, turn-of-the-millennium American rap, and even the weirder corners of SoundCloud; now, he is more concerned with how all of that might fit together. Big Conspiracy reunites Hus with Common Sense architect Jae5, along with co-producers TSB and IO, and as a unit, they create the rapper’s most balanced and full-bodied music yet. You discover that his versatility comes from feeling adrift and misunderstood in his own country, and these songs are a journey back to the center of his true self. Big Conspiracy plays like J Hus wants to set the record straight. This is who he is: a lost son of Gambia, an adult-in-progress, a talented pop polymath, and just a guy who has a lot of sex. Common Sense was playfully aimless, a horny playboy fantasy with a few songs about gangsta paranoia. There’s still plenty of that here, too: he’s libidinous across “Fortune Teller,” and “Helicopter” emphasizes the terrors of probation and plainclothes officers stalking him. But this album more clearly sketches out his development from displaced African boy to imprisoned British man, and it is by far the best J Hus has been on record as a performer and storyteller. There are introspective raps about his incarceration and prison culture, colorism, and colonialism; about the fear and paranoia and violence that come with street life; about carrying a knife around London and being ready to use it, and why using it might be necessary. Ever since the stabbing in 2015, his music has carried the urgency of knowing your attackers are simply waiting for an opportunity to finish the job. That cuts through Big Conspiracy’s more muted and low-key vibe. On “Must Be,” he’s seeing adversaries everywhere. The frenzied grime cut “No Denying” finds him at his most convincingly defiant: “You know me, I’m the livest, call on all your riders/Call on all your strikers, me, I don’t even fear death/You don’t know me, I’m fearless, me, I’m out here bare chest,” he raps. He’s not just self-assured, he’s invincible. While Hus is an undeniably captivating rapper, he isn’t going to bowl anyone over with his lyricism. He is a solid, dependable writer somewhat reliant on his ability to sound comfortable in any setting, and he usually impresses with his charisma and the sheer command of his range. But his pivot toward interiority gives his songs a new dimension. His bars are simple, straightforward, and can occasionally lean toward fortune-cookie wisdom (“Get the bread, avoid the drama/You can avoid the feds but not the karma,” he raps on “Fight For Your Right”), but throughout the album, he seems to be growing more secure in himself. The focus throughout Big Conspiracy is finding the person at the center of a musical matrix. Big Conspiracy joins records like Burna Boy’s African Giant and GoldLink’s Diaspora, which found connections between black music the world over, but like Dave’s Psychodrama this album feels distinctly about the personal turmoil of being the child of African immigrants raised in London, making a home in a place you don’t belong. “I had to play dumb, just to blend in/Then go to Africa for spiritual cleansing,” he explains in the final moments of closer “Deeper Than Rap.” Being uprooted has threatened many family trees; sometimes finding ways to take root in a foreign land is the only way to survive.

2020-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

2020-01-29T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Black Butter

January 29, 2020

03fa6eba-dfe5-421f-bb08-8dc7c906b312

Sheldon Pearce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/

Sadly living up to the album's title, Daft Punk follow the exquisite, joyous Discovery with a record on which they seem to be going through the motions and, for the first time in their career, sounding like cynics.

Sadly living up to the album's title, Daft Punk follow the exquisite, joyous Discovery with a record on which they seem to be going through the motions and, for the first time in their career, sounding like cynics.

Daft Punk: Human After All

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/2137-human-after-all/

Human After All

Ideally, the physics of record reviewing are as elegant as actual physics, with each piece speaking to the essence of its subject as deliberately and as appropriately as a real-world force reacting to an action. In that world, where this is just another record by another dance act, Human After All is passable and hardly special. But in my head, where items like Homework and Discovery and-- oh, what the hell-- "Music Sounds Better With You" and "So Much Love to Give" are allowed to be admitted as evidence, and where the weight of expectation and precedence get to have a say, this feels like not just a failure, but a heartbreaker. The rap on Human After All is that it was recorded in two weeks, which should've been our first clue that it was going to surface as a droopy flower. Such cavalier recording approaches fly in the rock world because listeners are forgiving of minimal production methods; hell, as any Julian and Fab'll tell you, under the right light, they'll even embrace them. In rock music, where descriptors like "raw" and "ragged" are virtues, finesse is not only unnecessary, it's often discouraged. In dance music, where the illusion of performance has to be sculpted, finesse is more critical-- make a record in two weeks and 99.6% of the time, it'll sound like it was made in two weeks. Turns out Daft Punk are (mostly) human after all, because from a compositional standpoint, this sounds like it was made in about 19 days. Even the good stuff sounds painfully extemporaneous, like early sketches of tracks that deserve to be much better. Take the title cut-- a slick, vocoder-driven track that, despite being one of the better offerings on the record, has such a clinical build that it registers as patterned and completely starved of joy. It's Daft Punk going through the motions and, for the first time in their career, sounding like cynics. If there's a defining thread to Human After All, it's that there's very little here that rings with wonderment or joy. The songs that make the most overt stabs at those emotions still sound like vague approximations of better songs that preceded them: "Robot Rock" is a poor man's "Aerodynamic", "Technologic" a poor man's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger", and so on. Ultimately, it's the phoned-in "Television Rules the Nation" that confirms Daft Punk's slackening standards; they give us nine proper songs after four years and this is one of them? In the end, it's not as if there aren't things to like about Human After All-- both "Make Love" and "Emotion", for example, are totally charming. I just wish that they didn't come at the expense of Daft Punk's mystique. Then again, if the point is to be rock, maybe on some totally boring level, they've succeeded admirably: What's more rock'n'roll than hitting the self-destruct button?

2005-03-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

2005-03-14T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Virgin

March 14, 2005

03fc2034-3fb3-436b-83ed-e1d0f3259bdf

Mark Pytlik

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mark-pytlik/

The Atlanta trio Migos come back after a commercial and creative dry spell with a #1 single and a definitive work.

The Atlanta trio Migos come back after a commercial and creative dry spell with a #1 single and a definitive work.

Migos: Culture

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22777-culture/

Culture

Okay, just for a second—as a thought experiment—let’s treat Culture as the sophomore album from the Migos. In this reality, it marks a sharp improvement from the North Atlanta trio’s debut, 2015’s Yung Rich Nation, an album that showed a tremendous amount of technical dexterity, but stiffer writing and only half-formed pop instincts. The Migos are better now, we’d say. They really grew. In the real world, of course, Culture comes in a long, long line of hits, mixtapes, and one-offs. Since “Versace” and Y.R.N. (Young Rich Niggas) marked their breakthrough in 2013, they’ve been one of the most influential acts in hip-hop, and frequently one of the best. Their most obvious mark on the culture has been the tight, triplet-laced flow they resurrected and perfected. They also brought the dab to the world at large, and injected a handful of slang terms into the syntaxes of aspiring rappers from coast to coast. So Culture arrives in what feels like the second act of a long career, by rap standards. The Migos came out as young upstarts, suffered through a litany of legal hang-ups and incarcerations, had short creative dry spells where they sniped at the kids on the lawn stealing their styles, and eventually came back around. This time, they have a #1 hit in tow, and they want to stick at the top of the commercial pyramid. The first voice you hear on Culture is DJ Khaled’s, which couldn’t be more misleading. This isn’t a big-budget parade of set pieces and stunt casting; if anything, it’s remarkable for how long stretches of it are sober, somber. Culture’s midpoint is the phenomenal, Zaytoven-produced “Big on Big,” which is towering and defiant, and even flips their well-documented label troubles into a point of pride. That track is followed by two more (“What the Price,” “Brown Paper Bag”) that stick to minor keys and contemplative piano. There are plenty of stray prescription pills and idle threats to go around, but they’ve been reassembled to be eerier, more perilous. (Incidentally, this would have been a perfect place to insert “Cocoon,” their staggering loosie from last year.) Culture is front-loaded with singles, which—perhaps counter-intuitively—makes for a nice balance. Heard back-to-back-to-back, “T-Shirt,” “Call Casting,” and “Bad and Boujee” are not only packed with color and virtuosic rapping, but elucidate exactly what each of the three rappers bring to the table, how they complement one another. Hearing Quavo float is a joy, but it’s even better when it’s underscored by Takeoff’s bass and Offset’s serration. There are also fascinating reconciliations: The Cardo-produced, 2 Chainz-featuring “Deadz” seems to find a middle ground between the sparse Atlanta sounds and Chicago’s maximalism that were warring around the time of Y.R.N. Then there are truly strange moments. “All Ass,” from the album’s (uh) back end, sounds like Magic City mixed with industrial Berlin. “Slippery,” in an inspired move, turns a “skrrt skrrt” ad-lib into the song’s melodic backbone. Even when Culture grasps for the radio dial, it skirts expectations. The arc here is not one of artists leaving their roots to chase pop—it’s pop coming back around to accommodate them. While the Migos are decidedly of Atlanta (coupled with some cadences from up in Tennessee), their records frequently remind you of rap’s earlier years, when creative kids holed up in bedrooms and tried to impress or make each other laugh—think The Migos Is Dead or Bizarre Ride II Nawfside. Culture might have national aspirations, but it’s charged with the energy of history, of family. On “What the Price,” Takeoff raps about the teachers and preachers of his youth who presented an inaccessible, exclusionary path forward. When he shirks that (“I’ma go find me a better route”), it’s not flippant, it’s resolute. Later on the same song, Offset runs through a consumer fever dream, anchored by the line “I don’t plan on going out sad today.” In other contexts, that might be a curious aside, but over Ricky Racks, 808Godz and KeanuBeats’ somber track, it sounds like the album’s spiritual center. The Migos are (probably) not better than the Beatles, but their existence shouldn’t be reduced to memes that debate the issue. On Culture, their world is richly rendered, full of hopes and paranoia and unbridled joy. This gives the Migos the last laugh on those who thought they’d never crack the retail album format, marked all the while by the knowledge they never needed one to succeed. It’s a definitive work.

2017-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-01-31T01:00:00.000-05:00

Rap

Quality Control / 300 Entertainment

January 31, 2017

0405018f-96d6-4632-a316-5863906ae050

Paul A. Thompson

https://pitchfork.com/staff/paul-a. thompson/

The Copenhagen duo Age Coin features two former members of the post-punk band Lower producing bleak industrial techno. Their second LP is inconsistent, but shows promise.

The Copenhagen duo Age Coin features two former members of the post-punk band Lower producing bleak industrial techno. Their second LP is inconsistent, but shows promise.

Age Coin: Performance

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22773-performance/

Performance

Though Age Coin produces industrial techno, the Copenhagen duo isn’t quite of the club. Kristian Emdal and Simon Formann were both members of the now-defunct post-punk band Lower, and their proximity to punk and noise is tangible on Performance, their second full-length, which echoes the intense, bleak temperaments of the bands who have come to define that scene. While the release’s best moments are intricate and beat-driven, its dominant mode seems located more in its interludes of thinly-built, staticky unease. Taken as a whole, these stops and starts can feel less intentionally unsteady and more flat-out inconsistent. In terms of cultivating a mood, *Performance *starts on a high note. Opener “Esprit”’s rumbling bass crawls into focus, low-end slowly receding to highlight a single tinny beat. It’s dread-inducing, but also engaging and concise. The lead single “Raptor,” far and away the release’s standout track, follows in this vein: its staccato rhythm is tempered with broad, wavering strokes of melody, creating a rare sense of breathing room. It’s reminiscent of textured, Modern Love-style ambient techno, like a softer-edged Demdike Stare. Elsewhere, things turn more abstract, and more claustrophobic. “Damp”’s horror-film textures ruminate for a few minutes before opening into cold, insistent percussion, never quite boiling over into true noise. “Protein” is similarly soaked in chilling atmospherics, structured around an anxious, fragmentary jungle beat. In a jarring change of pace, “Domestic I” and “Domestic II” dispense with beats altogether, instead overlaying a persistent buzz and clatter with mournful instrumentation: on “I,” a cello met with whining harmonies, and on “II,” a pretty, rickety piano solo. They’re not unattractive compositions, but for the time they take up on this otherwise fairly brief release, these interludes don’t feel particularly well-integrated or useful. Moments of Performance offer welcome glimpses of something more complex than their once-stated mission to evoke “feeling really low in a corner of the club.” “Raptor” gives a particularly danceable example of this forward movement, but more fearsome moments like closer “Headron” are also promising. At their best, Age Coin synthesize the ambient and industrial mood-building of their past and concurrent projects with the physicality of techno, inducing anxiety through the occasional application of a frenetic texture. A more exciting approach might dispense with the instrumental experiments and embrace this path full-on.

2017-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00

2017-02-01T01:00:00.000-05:00

Electronic

Posh Isolation

February 1, 2017

0406337e-e716-4055-8d86-9e8672f6e377

Thea Ballard

https://pitchfork.com/staff/thea-ballard/

The ascendant singer’s star-making second album is a collection of sophisticated, hard-bodied pop-funk that gives way to slick, Kylie Minogue-inspired disco.

The ascendant singer’s star-making second album is a collection of sophisticated, hard-bodied pop-funk that gives way to slick, Kylie Minogue-inspired disco.

Dua Lipa: Future Nostalgia

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/dua-lipa-future-nostalgia/

Future Nostalgia

No 2017 pop release had legs like Dua Lipa’s self-titled debut. “New Rules,” the know-your-worth anthem that became her breakout, was actually the sixth single from an album delayed eight months past its original release date. While Dua Lipa’s long shelf life built the British and Kosovar Albanian singer’s fanbase, the trickle of new music she appeared on in the interim—a major hit with Calvin Harris’ “One Kiss,” the throwback house of Diplo and Mark Ronson’s “Electricity”—maintained her momentum. Three years later, the Dua Lipa release schedule looks very different: Her second record, Future Nostalgia, arrives a week early, ostensibly because of the coronavirus pandemic, though maybe because fans had already leaked it. Anchored by lead single “Don’t Start Now,” an instant staple of pop DJs and barre classes, Future Nostalgia is a collection of sophisticated, hard-bodied pop-funk that gradually gives way to slick, Kylie Minogue-inspired disco. Capitalizing on a love of ’80s pop and ’90s club culture, Lipa and a team of career producers (Stephen “Koz” Kozmeniuk, Ian Kirkpatrick, Stuart Price, Jeff Bhasker) tunnel deeper into retro-pop revival, a flashy dancefloor timewarp aimed at the type of pop fan who can’t hear Olivia Newton-John’s original 1981 hit “Physical” without imagining what it might sound like with the string sample from “Hung Up” chopped and layered on top. Future Nostalgia sounds like three Madonna eras at once, like Giorgio Moroder making blog house. Like all classic dance music, it’s more concerned with the thrill of new passion than with what happens after the sun rises. At 24, Lipa has been working towards this moment for almost 10 years, and her sights are set higher still. A false start in modeling impressed the importance of going where you’re wanted; in Lipa’s case, to Warner Records, who sought a female pop icon to compete with the Rihannas and Lady Gagas of the world. She leveraged her talent as a songwriter, developing an early Dua Lipa single, “Hotter Than Hell,” in the first session with her prospective management team. Her sly swagger and fashion-plate style gave her the presence of someone who’d achieved diva status already. “I’m a bit too far down the line for anyone to try and tell me something,” she said of her creative autonomy in 2017, even before the release of her first record. But where many of pop’s most recent stars are emphatically emotionally available, Lipa radiates blithe coolness. Her brand is style, competence, taste—this is, in a way perhaps not obvious to those who actually remember the ’80s, entirely tasteful pop music—and the sultry low voice that makes her the star of even a middling Martin Garrix collab. Future Nostalgia is nonstop, no ballads; for 10 tracks, the closest it comes to feeling vulnerable or revealing is “Pretty Please,” a plea for stress-relief sex with an ultra-thick bassline. When Lipa proclaims, “You got me losing all my cool/’Cause I’m burning up on you,” on the Tove Lo cowrite “Cool,” she rhymes it with, “In control of what I do.” It’s Lipa’s strongest stance: all-in on self-determination. The thrill of Future Nostalgia—the title itself a claim to modern classic status—is in hearing her tailor the retro-funk form to suit her commanding attitude. “No matter what you do, I’m gonna get it without ya/I know you ain’t used to a female alpha,” she proclaims on the title track. Which is why it’s a disappointment when the album’s confident strut falters, first with the “bad/mad/sad” rhymes on “Good in Bed” and finally with the awareness anthem “Boys Will Be Boys,” a funk-free flip of the sexist trope (“…but girls will be women”). Layered choral arrangements soften the ultra-literal writing, but as a closer, it brings the party to a screeching halt, with a serious tone that feels at odds with everything preceding it. What should be heartfelt and meaningful—a song to contrast Lipa’s aloofness and demonstrate her range—instead undermines what Future Nostalgia does best: proud, flawless bravado. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2020-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

2020-03-27T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Warner

March 27, 2020

0407dacd-be7f-4ff1-96cc-2c5291736e77

Anna Gaca

https://pitchfork.com/staff/anna-gaca/

The Atlanta rapper’s official debut is an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. It is a perversely infectious sugar high, rap that fundamentally recalibrates the brain’s reward centers.

The Atlanta rapper’s official debut is an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. It is a perversely infectious sugar high, rap that fundamentally recalibrates the brain’s reward centers.

Playboi Carti: Die Lit

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/playboi-carti-die-lit/

Die Lit

Being a great rapper has never been a prerequisite for making great rap music, but few rappers have ever tested that premise quite as aggressively as Playboi Carti. On his self-titled 2017 debut, the twitchy Atlanta rapper compensated for his shortcomings as a lyricist with vision and spirit, bouncing his sticky ad-libs off of gloopy, gummy beats that played out with the insane logic of a “Double Dare” obstacle course. “Damn, my shit so radical,” Carti bragged, and it truly was. Yet, amazingly, that project sounds almost conservative compared to Die Lit, a 57-minute sugar high that’s even wilder, more disorienting, and more perversely infectious than its predecessor. Atlanta swag-rap pioneers Travis Porter and Rich Kidz paved the way for Carti’s giddy style, but even they never took it to such delirious extremes. Die Lit is all cream filling, no Oreo. It’s letting a 4-year-old pour his own salad dressing then watching as he absolutely floods his plate with Hidden Valley Ranch. It’s those levels of Mario where the pipes and clouds spew so many coins and one-ups at you that you wonder why you spent all those other levels collecting them one by one. This is music that fundamentally recalibrates the brain’s reward centers. Once again, the primary architect behind these addictive fragmented tones is producer Pi’erre Bourne, working from a reserve of what sound like hacked Gameboys, busted subwoofers, and chopped and screwed snippets of Ratatat records. Bourne is a one man Acme Corporation assembly line, and in Carti he’s found the perfect foil for his mischief, a fellow iconoclast similarly willing to test the boundaries between catchy and obnoxious. The two have some of the most quixotic chemistry of any producer/rapper combo since Zaytoven and Gucci Mane disrupted Atlanta’s rap scene more than a decade ago. Where Carti’s full-length last year was technically a mixtape, Die Lit is being marketed as his official debut, which is often when commercial considerations set in and the fun ends. But while the album is loaded with guest features, including ones from Travis Scott and Nicki Minaj, they never upset its surrealist vision. Even “Fell in Luv (feat. Bryson Tiller)” isn’t as cynical as title threatens; it’s just a typically loopy Playboi Carti song with a Bryson Tiller verse that’s mixed like somebody tried to erase it then gave up. With its victorious pianos, the Lil Uzi Vert-assisted triumph anthem “Shoota” is the album’s one obvious concession to radio’s ideal of tunefulness, but it’s an absolute stunner of a track, and it also works as a window to the world outside of Bourne’s studio, highlighting just how odd and malformed all the beats around it are. Mostly, Die Lit uses outside voices as accent pieces. London grime icon Skepta elbows his way into “Lean 4 Real,” and although his accent cuts a sharp contrast against nearly any American rapper, here it’s just his mere enunciation that comes as a shock. Young Thug joins Carti in making lots of silly noises on “Choppa Won’t Miss,” and they sound like kids playing over a toy chest. Bourne even gets two verses, because really almost any voice will suffice on music like this, and his is serviceable enough (“Bags of the future/Did it all off computers” is also a pretty solid brag for a producer). In an Atlanta rap scene that tends to progress incrementally, with artists building off of a shared pool of ideas and advancing the breakthroughs of others, Die Lit is an anomaly, an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. At its best—which is to say almost the entire thing, really—the album almost seems to suspend gravity. How does a rapper this basic pull off a project this electrifying? No, Carti’s rapping isn’t any better this time out. And no, it really doesn’t matter. When the carnival itself is this magnificent, there’s no need to nitpick the ring-leader.

2018-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

2018-05-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

AWGE / Interscope

May 16, 2018

040e4873-d144-4514-90fe-02230c56cc65

Evan Rytlewski

https://pitchfork.com/staff/evan-rytlewski/

A young writer with a working sense of humor and no apparent agenda, Courtney Barnett feels like a refreshing anomaly in 2015: smart but not intellectual, humble but not wimpy, into the past but not theatrical about it. Her debut album delivers on the promise of 2013's EP collection.

A young writer with a working sense of humor and no apparent agenda, Courtney Barnett feels like a refreshing anomaly in 2015: smart but not intellectual, humble but not wimpy, into the past but not theatrical about it. Her debut album delivers on the promise of 2013's EP collection.

Courtney Barnett: Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20268-sometimes-i-sit-and-think-and-sometimes-i-just-sit/

Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit

A young man adrift ditches work mid-commute... a swimmer passes out trying to impress the person in the next lane... a couple goes house-hunting and ends up peering into the life of a widow: These are just a few of the ordinary-extraordinary moments captured on Courtney Barnett's Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit. And like all moments, they pass, sometimes with event but usually without. Not that event seems to matter either way to Barnett, who shows up in her own songs like a bemused local taking questions from a camera crew that rushed to the scene in hopes of finding someone more interesting. "I had goggles on," she notes in the swimmer song ("Aqua Profunda!"). "They were getting foggy/ I much prefer swimming to jogging." Sit is Barnett's first album, the follow-up to two EPs collected on a Barnettily-titled product called The Double EP: A Sea of Split Peas. Its music is descended from 1990s grunge, descended in turn from '60s garage and psychedelia—the rocks to the balloons of Barnett's thoughts, which blow back and forth above the distorted guitars buoyed by gas we can't actually see. Without her words, the music would sit there; without the music, Barnett would drift away. Half the time, she doesn't even sing, but talks, slipping into melody mid-line as though she just remembered she was playing music. A young writer with a working sense of humor and no apparent agenda, Barnett seems like a throwback to a simpler time—Simpler Times being less a period in history than a fictional place visited through fairytales, Buddhist anecdotes, and characters like Winnie the Pooh, whose creator, A. A. Milne, is sometimes credited with the line from which Barnett takes her record's name. An ease surrounds her music, a looseness: Even at their most clever, her songs glide from line to line and thought to thought, a stray observation about cracks in the walls leading to something about the wrinkles in Barnett's own palm, propelled by rock'n'roll that seems to find itself plenty serviceable but nothing to stop and fuss over. "I just know what I know," she recently told The New York Times; "I think I'm shit some days, and some days I think I'm pretty good," she told Grantland. To paraphrase the composer and philosopher John Cage, Barnett has nothing to prove and she's proving it. Doting too seriously on Sometimes I Sit misses what I take to be Barnett's point: Life is but a dream, tra la la, whatever. Even the album's biggest moments grow from small places, like the washed-up seal corpse in "Kim's Caravan" that spins out into a meditation on mortality, pollution, what it means to be stewards to our environments and to ourselves—a mental crescendo matched by a band that keeps ebbing deeper into feedback. In the end, Barnett returns invariably to herself, a subject she finds hard enough to understand. If all this seems a little heady in discussion, it's to the credit of Barnett and her band—Dave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloane—that it doesn't sound that way on record. I don't know how things are in Barnett's Australia, but here in the U.S., A.D. 2015, she seems like an anomaly: A young songwriter who is smart but not intellectual, humble but not wimpy, into the past but not theatrical about it, aware of her feelings and aware of how too many feelings makes everyone bored. Sometimes I Sit's most sentimental song is that house-hunting one. "Depreston", it's called—a quiet, countryish ballad that breaks up the noise around it. Barnett takes us into the neighborhood, into the house, into the sad little details that make her seem like a writery-writer: the picture of a young soldier, the safety rail in the shower. She mentions them once and doesn't linger because she knows there's no point—nothing she could add to the image would make it sadder than it is. Instead she slips into a refrain of how much it might cost to tear the house down and build a new one, which she repeats over and over again, until the memory of the shower is gone. A little life is plenty.

2015-03-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

2015-03-23T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Mom+Pop / Marathon Artists / Milk!

March 23, 2015

040e953f-95fa-4e1a-bf35-aff9d545e257

Mike Powell

https://pitchfork.com/staff/mike-powell/

The New Jersey singer-songwriter’s five-song EP tries out different frames for her strikingly powerful voice, variously exploring reggaetón, futuristic Americana, and psychedelic club pop.

The New Jersey singer-songwriter’s five-song EP tries out different frames for her strikingly powerful voice, variously exploring reggaetón, futuristic Americana, and psychedelic club pop.

Ambar Lucid: Get Lost in the Music EP

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/ambar-lucid-get-lost-in-the-music-ep/

Get Lost in the Music EP

Don’t operate heavy machinery while listening to Ambar Lucid: Just a couple releases into her career, the songwriter has already demonstrated a natural talent for songs equally capable of distracting your thoughts and seizing control of your physical movements. The New Jersey musician started out with a sort of soft-psych R&B on her debut, 2019’s Dreaming Lucid, which skewed more toward singer-songwriter introspection than pop spectacle. But on last year’s Garden of Lucid, she embraced more luxurious beats and dove into the low end, opening a portal to a sleek alternate dimension. Both contexts served to illuminate her wonderful voice: lethally sharp and surprisingly hefty, slicing cleanly through the open air with just the slightest vibrato, like a javelin. Lucid’s new release sharpens the portrait of a young songwriter ravenously building a repertoire of frames for her voice. The five-song EP probes five different directions, ranging from Mazzy Star cosplay (“Space Cowgirl”) to movimiento (“Un Animal (Divina Existencia)”) to a song about falling in love with a lizard that sounds like she’s singing from inside a video game (“Lizard”). (Los Angeles duo the Wavys produced the majority of the EP, save for “Un Animal (Divina Existencia),” produced by Julian Cruz and Kel777.) The distance between a song like the vulnerable Dreaming Lucid standout “Eyes” and Get Lost in the Music’s funk-filthy closing track, “The Door,” is far enough to suggest an artist who is still trying to figure out who she is, but somehow Lucid never sounds lost. You get the same sense when she flips easily between Spanish and English, even rhyming the two languages with each other and basically code-switching mid-verse: The 20-year-old wants to try it all, and she can get comfortable anywhere. The EP rides waves of sheer fervor and endurance. At every turn, Lucid sounds passionate in pursuit of the perfect song, young and restless and incapable of letting up for even a single four-bar section. Her pivot from the first verse to the refrain of “Lizard” is a perfect example: One moment she’s practically bulletproof, rap-singing in staccato bursts and letting her worries bounce off the beat. In the next, she retreats so fully into a softer, hypnotized voice, you’re convinced that this lizard whose presence she dissolves in must be as magical as she says—and that she must have met its gaze in that split second. Get Lost’s one true shortcoming is that its lyrics aren’t as satisfyingly strange or emotionally evocative as Lucid is capable of writing. (She definitely does not lack a talent for lines that you keep turning over in your head; I’m still trying to pin down “Without you, I don’t know what I would cease to do,” from “Eyes.”) She instead favors some slightly cheaper psychedelic signals: She is “traveling through space and time” on the opener; she urges you to wake up on “Un Animal (Divina Existencia)” and to “get lost in the music with me” on the title track. That last one sounds tailor-made for the club, but instead of racking up vodka Red Bulls, she meets a psilocybin god who schools her in ego death: “Magic mushrooms singing to me/Telling me all of the answers are in front of me.” In the era of streaming and playlists, the distinction between EPs and LPs might be losing its meaning entirely. But the five-track package still can still be the perfect vehicle for a significant artistic step forward, when not treated as a collection of scraps or between-albums stopover, and instead given proper autonomy and attention (as Sofia Kourtesis did, for example, on her recent Fresia Magdalena). Get Lost in the Music feels more like the toe-dipping that precedes that stride than the step itself: Lucid seems to be trying on some new outfits here, testing which styles suit her best, with one eye on herself and one eye on her next move. Not one of them looks like a bad fit right now. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

2021-07-01T00:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

300 Entertainment

July 1, 2021

0410cfee-e47e-4ac7-9dff-fad65e7e6929

Steven Arroyo

https://pitchfork.com/staff/steven-arroyo/

On its third album, the Spanish quartet adds complexity to its hooky brand of indie pop, fleshing out its arrangements and digging into darker themes.

On its third album, the Spanish quartet adds complexity to its hooky brand of indie pop, fleshing out its arrangements and digging into darker themes.

Melenas: Ahora

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/melenas-ahora/

Ahora

The first two albums by Spanish quartet Melenas exude pure joy. On 2017’s Melenas and 2020’s Días Raros, ebullient hooks and bright rhythms abound in infectiously catchy tunes. Their brand of energetic indie pop topped by crafty vocal harmonies is wide enough to encompass moments of reflection and even some darkness. But it’s hard to come away from either album without feeling uplifted. It would be wrong to say that Melenas’ new album, Ahora, isn’t also uplifting. The first single from the record, “Bang,” is as bouncy as it gets, sparked by a motorik beat, sprightly keyboards, and criss-crossing voices; the accompanying video shows the four band members literally skipping along to the tune. But Ahora is more nuanced and more textured. Melenas have added complexity to their music without abandoning their hooks or their vibrant spirit. In essence, they’re doing what they’ve always done, but on a deeper level than before. Part of that new depth comes down to arrangements and production. Synthesizers are more prominent on Ahora, sometimes layered with guitars and drums, sometimes taking the lead. On the wistful “Two Passengers,” a rising keyboard provides both backbone and pace until the band’s unison vocals melt into the glistening notes. Those blended voices are another reason why Ahora is denser than previous Melenas efforts. Nearly every track includes more than one vocalist, and often all four members sing. These harmonies are so frequent that the music feels collective and multi-dimensional, folding in an abundance of angles and numerous shades. Ahora’s lyrical themes are similarly deep. The title means “now,” and most songs deal with the idea of time—particularly appreciating the present and processing the past. The band confronts the subject head on: On the second track, the ear-worming “K2,” they admit, “Cuando miro atrás no sé medir la distancia/El tiempo que pasó ¿a quién se lo dí?” (“When I look back I can’t measure the distance/The time that passed, who did I give it to?”). In “Mal,” time is a bandit in the form of wasted effort: “Cuánta vida/Se quedó atrás/Cuántos planes/Por trabajar” (“How much life/Was left behind/How many plans/Because of work”). As direct as their lyrics can be, Melenas can be subtle, too. On Ahora’s catchiest tune, the stair-stepping “1986,” the dangerous attraction of a flame becomes a metaphor for fascination and repulsion. The wistful “Flor de la frontera” beholds the miraculous way a plant dies and re-emerges every year, while the elegiac “Promesas” measures time by how often plans get pushed down the road. If this all seems a little sad, don’t worry; Melenas bathe these reflections in beaming music, sweetening even the most downbeat themes. And they find some answers, too. On Ahora’s most profound piece, “Tú y yo,” they celebrate the fact that time never stands still. “El cielo tiene otro color/Las calles son solo de dos” (“The sky has a different color/The streets belong to only two”), they sing. “Y hoy también podría ser mejor” (“And today could be better too).” It’s a refreshingly unjaded finale that helps the album earn its sunny outlook.

2023-12-08T08:28:36.901-05:00

2023-12-08T08:28:36.901-05:00

Rock

Trouble in Mind

December 8, 2023

04118512-863f-466b-98c8-e386d0affff4

Marc Masters

https://pitchfork.com/staff/marc-masters/

On their second LP for DFA, Factory Floor’s post-punk past has dissolved into hardware dance pieces of monomaniacal repetition and stiff precision. It’s tirelessly energetic, but often in a brute way.

On their second LP for DFA, Factory Floor’s post-punk past has dissolved into hardware dance pieces of monomaniacal repetition and stiff precision. It’s tirelessly energetic, but often in a brute way.

Factory Floor: 25 25

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22189-25-25/

25 25

To date, Factory Floor have appeared in a state of constant flux, each successive release resembling a snapshot taken on the eve of a new mutation. Beginning as a claustrophobic post-punk band in 2008, their accelerated evolution has seen the North Londoners graduate through Chris & Cosey-style industrial dance, white-hot analog synth attacks, hi-NRG acid traxx, and New Order-indebted dance pop. The main point of continuity has been a manic energy that lingers somewhere between the ecstatic and the oppressive. True to form, 25 25, the group’s second long-player for DFA, marks the start of a new phase. Following 2013’s Factory Floor, modular synth player Dominic Butler quit the band—he now records thumping dance as part of the Diagonal-signed Bronze Teeth—leaving just the core duo of Gabriel Gurnsey and Nik Colk Void. This slimmed-down line-up means the Factory Floor of 25 25 feels less like a live rock band than ever before. Their post-punk past has dissolved into extended hardware dance pieces characterized by monomaniacal repetition and stiff, grid-like precision. Repetition has always been a part of the Factory Floor user’s manual, but here it appears to have become the guiding principle. A single acid gurgle loops throughout the eight-and-a-half minute opener “Meet Me at the End,” and while other sounds enter play—blocks of brittle handclaps, treble-boosted synths, and a ghostly voice commanding the listener to “work… work… work… work”—its abiding feel is one of confinement or suspension, of being trapped in a groove. A similar sense of limbo permeates “Relay” and “Dial Me In,” which rearrange a small palette of synths, hi-hats, and drums interminably. Such commitment to sparsity is evidently the result of aesthetic decision rather than low horizons. Gurnsey and Void have talked in interviews about paring back their music to bare necessities, and here any dynamic that feels surplus to requirements—which includes verses, choruses, drops, and breakdowns—has been ruthlessly expunged. This forced austerity even extends to Void’s vocals, which appear as fragments, often treated or time-stretched—perhaps a nod to the days when samplers could capture just a couple of seconds of low bit-rate audio. Even working within these self-imposed strictures, 25 25 is in places very good. “Ya” is the highlight, a fusion of jackin house and ’80s industrial dance that recalls New Order’s “Blue Monday.” It builds around a simple formula, but tosses in all manner of little tricks and flourishes—flurries of clacking woodblock, a sick acid line, a tom-tom roll dispatched with the flick of a wrist. (It definitely helps if you picture the vocal line as a laconic German robot sending up LCD Soundsystem’s “Yeah,” a sly little acknowledgement of the DFA pedigree.) “Slow Listen” filters an admonishing female vocal through groans of hoover bass and piston-pumping snare, while “Wave” is a slow-burner that builds elegant lattices of percussion, even as it bores down hard on one chord. But ultimately—at least placed next to Factory Floor’s largely excellent earlier records—25 25 feels a little undercooked. It is tirelessly energetic, but often in a brute, functional way. And while it works just great on a treadmill or running machine—I checked—I’m not sure that alone constitutes success on an artistic level. Revisit older Factory Floor tracks like “A Wooden Box” or “(R E A L L O V E)” and there remains something tantalizing there—the way they morph back and forth between live band and broiling techno, a trompe l’oeil for the ear. On 25 25, they’ve shed this dimension, and the results can feel depthless and a little flat. Pare back and pare back and pare back, and eventually you’re left with a blank canvas. Hopefully now, Factory Floor will figure out how to fill it anew.

2016-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-08-12T01:00:00.000-04:00

Electronic

DFA

August 12, 2016

04122ca8-a605-49b9-b34a-5547390f7966

Louis Pattison

https://pitchfork.com/staff/louis-pattison/

Latest from Doug Martsch and co. marks the first steps of an unexpected third chapter in the group's saga, casting off the usual meticulous guitar overdubs and studio polish in favor of a less refined, more spontaneous approach.

Latest from Doug Martsch and co. marks the first steps of an unexpected third chapter in the group's saga, casting off the usual meticulous guitar overdubs and studio polish in favor of a less refined, more spontaneous approach.

Built to Spill: You in Reverse

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/1016-you-in-reverse/

You in Reverse

It had seemed as if the story of Built to Spill was already more or less written: Indie pop band forgoes simple, summery perfection of early work to craft epic, melodic guitar-rock. From 1996's Perfect From Now On through 2001's Ancient Melodies of the Future, Built to Spill records served as a reliable platform for Doug Martsch's plaintive and layered songwriting, brought to life by a band whose talent and proficiency at times seemed boundless. You in Reverse marks the first steps of an unexpected third chapter in the group's saga, casting off the usual meticulous guitar overdubs and studio polish in favor of a less refined, more spontaneous approach. While the results are spotty, the change itself is welcome. Ancient Melodies of the Future was short on inspiration but flawlessly executed; tracks like "You Are" showed that the band could still make good on a paucity of musical ideas. By contrast, they sound downright energized on You in Reverse. The first Built to Spill album in a decade not to feature Phil Ek's crystalline production, You in Reverse wastes no time in establishing itself as its own distinct entity within the band's catalog: As the album begins, drummer Scott Plouf lays down an urgent backbeat that immediately blasts away the band's recent complacency, establishing opener "Goin' Against Your Mind" as one of their most insistent and muscular songs. That same spirit is evident on "Conventional Wisdom", which evokes the best of 1999's Keep It Like a Secret by pairing an explosive guitar hook with a characteristically strong Martsch vocal melody. While Ek might have pushed "Conventional Wisdom" toward restrained transcendence, here it conveys an unchecked exuberance that hasn't graced a Built to Spill record since There's Nothing Wrong With Love. Or at least, it does so for about two minutes, at which point Martsch stops singing and a totally unnecessary four-minute guitar jam ensues. Long songs are by no means new for Built to Spill but You in Reverse suffers from a lack of structure that leaves much of it sounding indulgent and extraneous. The longer songs on the classic Perfect From Now On invariably included a few grand but unobtrusive structural changes, as well as subtle shifts in dymanics and feel-- "Velvet Waltz", with its layers of shimmering guitar and reverberating percussion, seems downright economical at eight minutes. Most of the songs on You in Reverse start at full-blast, and the band often seems to have trouble figuring out where to go from there-- when the chorus rolls around at minute five of "Wherever You Go", not much has changed since the chorus three minutes prior. Aside from its abundance of overlong songs, You in Reverse is marred by a lack of strong melody when compared to Built to Spill's other records; aside from "Conventional Wisdom", nothing on You in Reverse approaches the seamless melodic dexterity of the band's best work. And yet this is also their most promising statement in years; far from the lovely stagnation of Ancient Melodies, You in Reverse suffers from the awkwardness of new beginnings.

2006-04-09T02:01:04.000-04:00

2006-04-09T02:01:04.000-04:00

Rock

Warner Bros.

April 9, 2006

04143154-38f5-4e22-8f64-27ab3f17b170

Matt LeMay

https://pitchfork.com/staff/matt-lemay/

To cut through and leave a lasting impression of Nick Jonas, the artist, would require a vision much bolder than what this album has to offer.

To cut through and leave a lasting impression of Nick Jonas, the artist, would require a vision much bolder than what this album has to offer.

Nick Jonas: Spaceman

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/nick-jonas-spaceman/

Spaceman

To those paying attention, Nick has long been known as the most ambitious of the brothers Jonas—the de facto bandleader, whose outsize aspirations drove them to their highest late-aught heights, and then over the edge to their breakup in 2013. In adulthood, Nick is certainly the most ubiquitous of the trio: Catch him on the big screen colonizing space, on the small screen doling out pop star wisdom to contestants on The Voice, on Broadway, in your local liquor store peddling branded tequila, and, of course, in the studio. Including Spaceman, his latest, Jonas has four solo albums to his name. Between the two of them, his brothers have just one. Jonas is rich, famous, hyper-visible—a member of a class whose behavior over the past year has arched many an eyebrow. In the throes of pandemic, celebrities have flubbed efforts to boost morale, and failed to disguise the ways that wealth—and the healthcare, real estate, mobility, etc. that it brings—mitigated the need to modify their lifestyles in the interest of public health. Still, relatability is a virtue in pop music, so Jonas approached Spaceman with an eye to shared experience. When, on the album’s first single and title track, he sings, “Mask off minute I get home/All safe now that I’m alone,” it’s clear that he’s not speaking metaphorically. Spaceman is divided into neat quarters, each with a distinct theme: distance, indulgence, euphoria, and commitment. Jonas has waxed poetic about the significance of the chapters, pegging each to the broader pandemic experience. The first three tracks explore the emotional toll of social isolation; the next two, the coping mechanisms he employed to deal with it. The “euphoria” segment proposes an antidote to the pain, and the final chapter, “commitment,” doubles down on that antidote (spoiler: it’s love). This is all a bit self-help-y. It also scans as an after-the-fact effort to make the album more topical, when its material is actually quite straightforward, and doesn’t warrant this sort of explanation. Using Nick’s liner notes to decode Spaceman feels a bit like cheating on the Monday crossword. He needn’t try so hard. There’s enough to like on this record, at least initially. With co-writer and executive producer Greg Kurstin—a champion of pleasurable, unchallenging pop, whose past clients have included Maggie Rogers, Maren Morris, and three-fifths of One Direction—Jonas concocts a gaseous synth-pop sound swollen with reverb, punctuated with Phil Collins-style drum fills, and elevated by liberal application of falsetto. The space theme enters the mix via futuristic blips and fragmented radio signals. Modulating synths gracefully bridge gaps between songs, demonstrating interest in the album format beyond its potential as a vessel for singles (though continuity goes out the window on Spaceman’s “Classics Edition,” which interpolates the four biggest hits from Jonas’ previous records into the new material). There are particular bright spots in the “indulgence” chapter, which ducks the album’s overall self-seriousness. “Delicious” is a juicy slice of blue-eyed funk, the sort that Jonas might have aspired to when he recruited core members of Prince’s New Power Generation to back him on 2010’s Who I Am. “2Drunk” lands lightly, and with a wink; Jonas sets a delightful scene (“Now I’m dancing in the kitchen/Breaking all the dishes/Breaking all the rules that I set myself”) and gamely makes himself the butt of the joke (“I think I just hit my stride/’til I wake up and hate my life”). He can’t sustain the buzz, though. In the morass of the album’s second half, we get “Deeper Love,” a song that, despite its title, doesn’t quite grasp the profundity of lifetime commitment. “I wanna know what it’d be like to know what I believe in/I wanna find it in your eyes,” Jonas sings, ambivalently. He’s 28 and married, but still relies on eye contact as a locus of stability, the same way he did on the Jonas Brothers smash “When You Look Me in the Eyes”—initially penned for his first solo album, which he released at age 12. If he’s is trying to light a fire with “Sexual,” he smothers it with the ham-handed lyric, “You put the sex in sexual.” The song namedrops Marvin Gaye, but has no place alongside “Sexual Healing” or “Let’s Get It On” in the hallowed canon of horny jams (though the electric sitar is a cute nod to wife Priyanka Chopra’s Bollywood roots). The dud parade marches on: The placid synth of “If I Fall” is soothing, but the song doesn’t hold water conceptually. Jonas is ostensibly singing about his current and forever love, but pretzels the premise by looking ahead to the next: “If I fall again/It’d be the last time.” What? “Death Do Us Part” is genuinely the record’s sexiest song—Jonas’ delivery is cool and relaxed, his ad libs additive—but verses comparing wedded bliss to assorted snacks (watermelon, Cool Whip, Pringles, caviar) verge on absurdity. “Wife guy” is a prominent part of Jonas’ public persona these days, the way “Disney kid” once was. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, it does bind his identity to that of another pop culture heavyweight, casting his music in the shadow of their combined celebrity. To cut through and leave a lasting impression of Nick Jonas, the artist, would require a vision much bolder than what Spaceman has to offer. The album’s interstellar concept is interesting enough to get it off the ground, but too quickly Jonas retreats to his domestic comforts, without really probing the relationship that so inspires him, or charting any new territory in the pop universe. It’s hard to imagine anyone who wasn’t already a Nick Jonas fan playing this album on repeat. His brand may sell, but this music is less desirable. Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.

2021-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

2021-03-16T01:00:00.000-04:00

Pop/R&B

Island

March 16, 2021

0415a605-7e6e-40c2-878d-2cb053ebb66c

Olivia Horn

https://pitchfork.com/staff/olivia-horn /

Adele is still young by any sensible metric, but much of 25, her third album, concerns itself with the passage of time: the inevitable accumulation of both years and vantages. Almost every song addresses heartache in one form or another and her instincts as a singer remain unmatched.

Adele is still young by any sensible metric, but much of 25, her third album, concerns itself with the passage of time: the inevitable accumulation of both years and vantages. Almost every song addresses heartache in one form or another and her instincts as a singer remain unmatched.

Adele: 25

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21246-25/

25

Adele is only 27 years old, still young by any sensible metric, but much of 25, her third album, concerns itself with the passage of time: the inevitable accumulation of both years and vantages. It’s as if she knows intimately the nauseating experience of waking up one morning, surveying a half-lived life, and thinking, "Oops." She never adopts a schoolmarm’s consternation (and she is entitled to some authority, having sold a boggling 30 million copies of her last record, 2011’s 21), but she is nevertheless cautionary, encouraging her listeners to do better, act faster, stop being such a bunch of clowns. Get up and get over, friend, she seems to be saying—you are a grown person now. Or: "We both know we ain’t kids no more," which is how she puts it on "Send My Love (To Your New Lover)", a song co-written by Max Martin, the 44-year-old Swedish super-producer who has now penned almost as many number one singles as Lennon and McCartney. Stack ‘em up, and all of Martin’s songs follow a particular formula: they’re prickly, quick-moving affairs that braid the precision of Swedish pop like ABBA with the more groove-oriented rhythms of American R&B. To that end, Martin is as exacting of a songwriter as I’ve ever heard: like he did with the tracks he made for Taylor Swift ("Shake It Off", "Blank Space", "Style") and Katy Perry ("I Kissed a Girl", "Teenage Dream", "Roar"), he relies on some enigmatic internal cadence, clipping syllables like a hiccuping poet, taking a tiny scalpel to his melodies. He keeps his lines pointy and balanced. "Send-my-love/ To-your-new/ Luh-uh-ver." The results are like encountering a person with perfectly symmetrical features—both instantly appealing and deeply, existentially unsettling. The song opens with carefully plucked acoustic guitar, and when the chorus comes in it’s as if someone yanked the curtains up on a dark room. Lyrically, Adele leans on a familiar kind of outrage, reckoning with a lover who broke every promise he ever made to her. There's unrequited love, but then there’s love that changes shape; if you’re unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of that transaction—made unwilling witness to the mysterious, alchemical shift in which devotion suddenly thins, sours—true understanding is impossible, a fool’s errand. This is the love that Adele sings of, the kind where there’s nothing left to do but resign: "I’m giving you up, I’m forgiving it all." Nurturing grudges is a young woman’s game. Almost every song on 25 addresses heartache in one form or another. "Send My Love" is anomalous in its confidence; more often, Adele sounds excruciatingly aware of her own blunders and bereavements, and the ways in which time has made them indelible. Sometimes, Adele herself is the agent of grief, like on "Hello", in which she attempts to reach an ex-lover on her flip-phone. Surely, on some level, Adele knows the message she’s so hungry to deliver—"I’m sorry/ For breaking your heart"—is not the kind of sentiment that’s going to yield her much more than a slowly raised middle finger (the indignation of the recently forsaken is vast, merciless). She is arguably more desperate to reach an earlier iteration of herself, to correct something, quiet some panic. Other times she is a victim of loss. In the piano ballad "When We Were Young", which was co-written with Tobias Jesso Jr., she sings: "Let me photograph you in this light/ In case it is the last time/ That we might be exactly like we were/ Before we realized." The instrumentation swells, quiets. The precise nature of that realization is not named, but of course it doesn’t need to be, or not explicitly (as Joan Didion wrote, in 1967, "It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends."). The song itself is a kind of homage to the booming, soft-focus singer-songwriters who dominated AM radio in the 1970s (Barbra Streisand, Shirley Bassey), and Adele’s vocal performance is astonishing, full of vigor and beauty. Still: the cumulative effect is sometimes as treacly as the heavily frosted sheet cake being slid onto the buffet table in the carpeted banquet hall where this song will be blasting, on a loop, for all of eternity. Even your most adorable aunt—the one who loves a Yankee Candle—will eventually drain her flute of sparkling wine, lean forward, and be like, "Dog, this shit is corny." Taken as a whole document, it is truly staggering how many of these songs—all of them, as far as I can tell—address the foibles of romantic love. It’s not so much that Adele’s lyrics are platitudinous (although they often are), it’s that the album’s prevailing sentiment eventually becomes wearying. In his book The Song Machine, John Seabrook interviews Bonnie McKee, the 31-year-old songwriter behind some of Katy Perry’s bigger hits and a frequent collaborator of Martin’s; McKee offers a pat, sorry-dude response to the question of lyrical uniformity in contemporary pop. "Most people still just want to hear about love and partying," is what she tells Seabrook. A shrug—a "Hey, it’s not us, it’s you! You dummies are the ones who want that!"—is implied. Perhaps that is what people want: Adele is presently on track to break N*Sync's record, held since 2000, of 2.24 million copies sold in the first week of release (on Friday, more than 900,000 people downloaded 25 from the iTunes store alone). And perhaps these songs are trifles, foregone conclusions that, instead of facilitating or inviting a deepening, allow for just one outcome: a peaceable head-bob, a wistful smile. They are one-way, dead-end roads, emotional shortcuts to wells of loss and contrition. But regardless of how one might feel about the spiritual utility of pop music, Adele’s instincts as a singer remain unmatched; she is, inarguably, the greatest vocalist of her generation, an artist who instinctively understands timbre and pitch, when to let some air in. It does not seem unfair to ask that dynamism of her songs, too.

2015-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

2015-11-23T01:00:00.000-05:00

Pop/R&B

XL

November 23, 2015

04179829-3f9f-4350-8a5c-a524b9659799

Amanda Petrusich

https://pitchfork.com/staff/amanda-petrusich/

Progressive country's lead tastemaker changes his path again. A Sailor's Guide to Earth finds Sturgill Simpson weirder and more adventurous than ever, forging a bold new way forward.

Progressive country's lead tastemaker changes his path again. A Sailor's Guide to Earth finds Sturgill Simpson weirder and more adventurous than ever, forging a bold new way forward.

Sturgill Simpson: A Sailor's Guide to Earth

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21758-a-sailors-guide-to-earth/

A Sailor's Guide to Earth

Sturgill Simpson's 2014 sophomore release, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, dragged "outlaw country" into modern times with acid-tongued clarity and a world-weary sense of humor. Its perspective was so refreshing that other like-minded albums came to be: Chris Stapleton enlisted Metamodern producer Dave Cobb to craft his own revivalist release Traveller, which won the 2016 Grammy for Best Country Album. While Metamodern Sounds of Country Music is certainly a record that invited imitation, it's darker and deeper than Stapleton's award winner or even Jason Isbell's most lauded recent solo albums (also produced by Cobb), a sometimes-nihilistic opus that proclaims things like “Ain't no point of getting out of bed if you ain't livin' the dream" and declares hallucinogens like DMT as lenses with which to see the truths of existence. The combination of the vintage music and the album's contemporary subject matter made for one of the most memorable releases of the last five years. While Simpson could have easily milked a few records out of that glum sound and guaranteed industry adulations for decades, A Sailor's Guide to Earth represents a startling change in tone and presents a wealth of rewards for every creative risk. Instead of counting turtles and finding a voice in classic country—Simpson himself smirks at the notion that he is a modern Waylon Jennings, because he doesn't listen to Waylon Jennings' music, though the connection is by no means inaccurate—Simpson is doing something far more difficult. Embarking on song cycle that draw upon sounds and songwriting styles that aren't found on his first two records at all, Simpson draws from his time in the Navy, where he was stationed in Japan, and the record is framed as a sailor's letter home to his wife and newborn son. (It's loosely based on a letter his grandfather wrote his grandmother).  It's a deeply personal album that, while establishing Simpson as the defining songwriter of his class, displays an artistic growth that defies any sort of easy label. The premise—a concept album addressed to his own son and wife—might sound corny, but the result is a beautiful and earnest record that flips the defeatist subtext of Metamodern on its head. The moods on A Sailor's Guide to Earth are brighter than on Metamodern, and the instrumentation on songs like “Keep It Between the Lines"—much of it provided by Sharon Jones' backing band, the Dap-Kings—is denser, bolder, and more rhythmic than anything Simpson has steered previously. (Simpson produced the record himself, deciding to spend his Atlantic Records budget chasing his instincts to their logical extreme). At the climax of side A, Simpson tosses in a countrypolitan Nirvana cover; one of the LP's more jarring moments occurs when Simpson sings “Sell the kids for food" on an album addressed to his son. To watch Simpson stretch (and succeed) is thrilling. The back half of the album is less audacious, making room for more contemplative moments like the tender ballad "Oh Sarah." Simpson holds onto the sneaky cleverness that distinguished Metamodern—"Get high, play a little GoldenEye/ That old 64!" Simpson shouts on "Sea Stories," like he's fondly remembering an old Cadillac—while taking a completely different journey.  If Metamodern was Waylon Jennings eating tabs of acid on a Tennessee back porch, A Sailor’s Guide is something like the musical combination of Moby Dick and Elvis. A Sailor's Guide to Earth plants Simpson at the forefront of the current crop of artists living beneath the always-contentious "alt-country"  banner. But what's most striking is how it completely redefines Simpson's own career, and sets him on his own unique path. Metamodern became the subject of trendpieces, where critics and fans alike willingly read into the drugs-and-darkness subtext that Simpson has himself been reluctant to endorse. But A Sailor's Guide to Earth is such a rearrangement of Simpson's sonic universe that any previous categorization now seems out of date. His earlier records communicate a weariness, dedicated to the journey to whatever's at the end of that long white line, even if it's sorrow. A Sailor's Guide to Earth takes a trip somewhere entirely different and life-affirming.

2016-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

2016-04-19T01:00:00.000-04:00

Folk/Country

Atlantic

April 19, 2016

0417a5f8-9cb3-4b0f-8040-8fc5ef12e0be

Corban Goble

https://pitchfork.com/staff/corban-goble/

Inspired by rap and R&B in equal measure, Drake becomes the first of the post-Kanye, emo-y rappers to fully deliver on his debut LP.

Inspired by rap and R&B in equal measure, Drake becomes the first of the post-Kanye, emo-y rappers to fully deliver on his debut LP.

Drake: Thank Me Later

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14367-thank-me-later/

Thank Me Later

Drake sings or raps the word "I" 410 times on his debut album. Even in the realm of hip-hop-- a style famous for its unswerving solipsism-- this is a feat. For comparison's sake, noted mirror watcher Kanye West managed to work only 220 "I"'s into the verses and hooks of his big break, The College Dropout. Illmatic; 210. Reasonable Doubt; 240. With Thank Me Later, Drake attempts to enter the pantheon of those rap game-busters by the sheer force of first person singular pronouns. All eyes are on him-- especially his own. But considering this mixed race, half-Jewish, all-Canadian "Degrassi: The Next Generation" alum looks and sounds unlike any major rap star before him, betting the house on nothing but himself turns out to be a wise gamble. Drake is the guy you get drinks with who talks about himself for a few hours-- if you're lucky, he might ask you for advice on one or two things. But this is OK because Drake's stories are better than yours. Like the one about how Lil Wayne befriended and signed him at the height of Weezy's powers. Or how he got with Rihanna last year. Or that time he flashed from a Toronto has-been to a top-flight hit maker off the strength of a self-released mixtape. Of course, there's the classic about sipping a few too many glasses of Ace of Spades and asking Nicki Minaj to marry him. Sounds like a sweet existence. But there's a problem. Even though he's a rich and handsome 23 year old spreading his music around the world in a five-star fashion, Drake really wants to be in the bottom bunk, hooking up with a girl next to the laundry basket at Totally Normal University, as he raps, "I wish I wasn't famous/ I wish I was still in school/ So I could have you in my dorm room/ I would put it on you crazy." Elsewhere, the irony is not lost on him, but he's not taking anything back: "I know that niggas would kill for this lifestyle/ I'm lookin' forward to the memories of right now." Simply, Drake is in love with his own lovelessness. But instead of lashing out against his would-be wifeys à la 808s and Heartbreak or falling into token misogyny, his relationship with women is more complicated. Whereas the unofficial mainstream hip-hop LP rulebook previously demanded a couple "ladies' night" tracks that were often pandering, insulting, or both, Drake lives for such softness. The brilliant and spare "Karaoke" finds him singing about a girl who can't deal with his newly jet-setting ways. "I was only trying to get ahead/ But the spotlight makes you nervous," he says, sounding more committed than a host of melisma-drunk heartthrobs. His relatively progressive and gentlemanly style is contagious, too; on the soon-to-be smash "Fancy", T.I. ditches the "superficial gold-digging bitches" he once praised on songs like "Whatever You Like", instead opting for a single lady with her own BMW and Jaguar in the garage. As if that wasn't enough, Mary J. Blige spiritually co-signs the sentiment by adding some subtle harmonies as the song draws to a close. Meanwhile, Drake's fellow Young Money upstart Nicki Minaj adds to the gender ambiguities, out-manning her host on the diabolical "Up All Night", and the album's steamiest pairing has him teaming with The-Dream for the uber-slow jam "Shut It Down". That song ends with Drake shamelessly trying to get in a new acquaintance's pants-- "take those fuckin' heels off, it's worth it, girl," he suggests. He's no angel. But even when this Romeo starts tossing dollar bills at a strip club on "Miss Me", his ogling is somehow lonely and level: "I don't judge her but I could never love her/ 'Cause to her I'm just a rapper and soon she'll have met another." As much as rap is built on artful navel-gazing, it's also founded in struggle. And just as Drake's dramatically exposed selfishness is unique to hip-hop, so are his adversities. He grew up in an affluent Toronto suburb and was graced with everything but a functional pair of parents, who split when he was three. Like Kanye West before him, Drake vies for superstardom while embracing his non-drug-dealing, non-violent, non-dire history-- one that connects with most rap fans in a completely reasonable way. And, suddenly, all that "I" turns into a lot of "we."

2010-06-15T02:00:00.000-04:00

2010-06-15T02:00:00.000-04:00

Rap

Young Money Entertainment / Cash Money / Universal Motown

June 15, 2010

0417e545-973a-4a38-866e-61e1b173e24e

Ryan Dombal

https://pitchfork.com/staff/ryan-dombal/

This posthumous release from the much-missed Detroit producer and MC was completed by Karriem Riggins and features guest spots from Common, D'Angelo, and Black Thought.

This posthumous release from the much-missed Detroit producer and MC was completed by Karriem Riggins and features guest spots from Common, D'Angelo, and Black Thought.

J Dilla: The Shining

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/9335-the-shining/

The Shining

Before his untimely passing this year, Detroit producer and MC J Dilla had established himself as one of hip-hop's most reliable auteurs. "He didn't overthink things," said Karriem Riggins, whom Dilla enlisted to finish the nearly completed The Shining shortly before his death, to the Detroit Free Press. Dilla's knack for intuitive and engaging beats served MCs well: His lucid, live-instrument-and-breakbeat-intensive production is synonymous with socially conscious rap's 1990s heyday-- a milieu on which Dilla left huge footprints with production credits on staples like the Pharcyde's Labcabincalifornia, A Tribe Called Quest's Beats, Rhymes and Life, and De La Soul's Stakes Is High. Yet his prevailing focus on soulful, dynamic listenability instead of jazzbo hokum (let us pass over Common's Electric Circus in silence) instilled a durability in his music that allowed it to survive the seismic shifts in aesthetics that rocked hip-hop over the past decade. Despite the erratic quality of his own group Slum Village's output, Dilla's consistently sharp production kept the flame alive for the soul-jacking, pop-friendly rap that would enjoy a resurgence with recently influential records by Common and Kanye West. A good hook, in other words, never goes out of style, and in a rap climate broad enough to allow for everything from deep-space funk to minimal snap music, Dilla's classicism acts as a control group amid more exotic strains. His other 2006 release, Donuts, with its profusion of brief instrumentals, was his record for heads-- a glorified beat tape that put the raw stuff of his vision on enticing display. In contrast, The Shining is more of a general audience record, by virtue of its song-length tracks and pervasive vocals from Dilla and his crew. As such, it presents challenges that Donuts didn't. On a beat tape, you can make your point in a few bars and move on to the next boom-bap, but an album wants structure and continuity. Dilla imposed this structure upon The Shining by two primary methods, with varying levels of success. The first was by cultivating a sense of unified variety, and this is where The Shining truly excels-- it's a great digest of Dilla's various moods and modes. We get sumptuous neo-soul: "Love" recreates the Impressions' "We Must Be in Love" as a crackling swoon punched up with hearty brass, while "Baby" uses sped-up infant samples as bold, primary-color accents for its supple pastels. We get vertiginous, Madlib-esque fire: "Geek Down" weaves a sinister net of thunderclap drums, weird wavering bass, demonic incantation, and a dominant line like a sliced-up kazoo; the rock-solid stomp of "E=MC2" radiates as variegated vocoder textures swell and decay. And we get straight-up trunk-rattle: "Jungle Love" laces wowing sirens over skeletal trash-compacter percussion, while "Body Movin'" carves up a cymbal-heavy wash with off-kilter squelch and abrupt vocal drops. The Shining's second layer of structural integrity resides in the guest vocals that dominate the album. Many of the record's guests also rose to prominence in the 1990s, though none of them remind us how much hip-hop has changed since then more starkly than Busta Rhymes: The guy who once had one of the most bugged-out flows in rap squanders "Geek Down" with thuggish, boring ad-libs that pay homage to the "fucking godfather Dilla" while contradicting the essence of his playful spirit. Common fares a bit better on "E=MC2", dropping innocuous party raps into the tight slots between the scratches and drums. He's equally passable sparring gently with the always sublime D'Angelo on "So Far to Go", which sports the sort of inventively dreamy yet perfectly coherent landscape Dilla also showed off on Steve Spacek's "Dollar", reminding us that the producer was as good with r&b atmosphere as he was with rap thwack (he makes Dwele sound way better than he has any right to on the "Dime Piece" remix). MED and Guilty Simpson spit nails that are well-suited to the junkyard jangle of "Jungle Love", while Black Thought mounts a commanding presence amid the overlapping click-tracks of "Love Movin'". Dilla embeds his own utilitarian rhymes in the deep digital swirls of "Won't Do", and while they don't add much force to the track, they pretty much stay out of the way. Staying out of the way was one of Dilla's assets-- one hears his productions, first and foremost, as songs, not as stylized renditions of his brand. This is why his music is at once so enduringly listenable and why it never fully cracked a mainstream obsessed with personality and trademarked tics-- Dilla's trademark was self-effacement in the service of the groove. The mainstream wanted him, but he mostly didn't want it, preferring to work with friends and kindred spirits, admitting as much with the sample that closes out "Baby": "How do I feel about radio hip-hop? I think it's wack. Most of the shit they play is straight garbage." Whether or not one agrees with the sentiment is beside the point in the context of The Shining-- it's simply an expression of Dilla's steadfast commitment to his own vision amid the shifting tides of rap culture at large.

2006-08-23T02:00:02.000-04:00

2006-08-23T02:00:02.000-04:00

Rap

BBE Music

August 23, 2006

0418318b-2553-46a8-8802-9facaf5c7003

Brian Howe

https://pitchfork.com/staff/brian-howe/

Stax issues an expanded 3xCD box set commemorating what is arguably the definitive r&b festival, featuring handfuls of artists-- including Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, and the Bar-Kays-- at the peaks of their careers.

Stax issues an expanded 3xCD box set commemorating what is arguably the definitive r&b festival, featuring handfuls of artists-- including Isaac Hayes, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, and the Bar-Kays-- at the peaks of their careers.

Various Artists: Wattstax

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/10594-wattstax/

Wattstax

As the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles was still reeling from the effects of the riots that tore it apart in 1966, a different epicenter of black culture was taking similar pains to recover and rebuild. Stax Records was hit with a series of events in the span of a year that would have sunk almost any other independent label: Warner Bros. bought Stax distributor Atlantic Records, swiping the Stax master tapes and distribution rights from label co-founder Jim Stewart. A December 1967 plane crash claimed the lives of marquee star Otis Redding and all but two members of session band the Bar-Kays. And five months afterwards, Martin Luther King-- a man who embodied the racially-integrated social philosophy that Stax couldn't exist without-- was assassinated in the same Memphis motel where Steve Cropper and Eddie Floyd co-wrote the #1 r&b hit "Knock on Wood". But as Stax's fortunes changed in the early 70s-- bolstered by the success of artists like Isaac Hayes, the Staple Singers and Johnnie Taylor-- a combination of financial uninhibitedness and social goodwill drove the label to organize a concert that would both showcase the label's expanding roster and serve as an inspiration to a community that the outside world considered second-class. Seven years after their first revue tour outside Memphis saw a number of their artists stranded in Los Angeles during the Watts riots, Stax returned to L.A. and put on one hell of a show. Some called it "the Black Woodstock", which isn't completely accurate; the cost was a dollar more than free, everyone on the bill was great (Albert King or Sha Na Na? Not a hard choice), and the attendees tended to dress a lot better. As a concert, film, and live recording, Wattstax is possibly the definitive r&b festival; only James Brown's shows have packed more energy and showmanship into a live set, and every artist-- from the Oscar-winning Hayes to the no-hit wonders that gigged in clubs around town in the week before the main event at the Los Angeles Coliseum-- is either at the peak of their artistic powers or damn well plays like it. Stax's 3xCD box set commemorating the event, re-released in the general vicinity of its 35th anniversary (though this particular collection first appeared in 2003), isn't the most important document of the show-- that'd be the concert film, directed by Mel Stuart (less than two years removed from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory)-- but it's easy to get an idea of every extra moment that made the whole experience legendary: Kim Weston's rendition of black national anthem "Lift Every Voice and Sing", Richard Pryor's comic yet cutting interstitials, and the Reverend Jesse Jackson's legendary introduction, which incorporated his poem "I Am - Somebody" into a 100,000-strong call-and-response. The concert proper is well-represented here, and it goes a long way toward showing how Stax was able to stay solvent in the early 70s even without longtime standbys like Sam & Dave or Booker T. & the M.G.'s. Not that there isn't any of the old guard represented here: Eddie Floyd busts his ass during a forceful rendition of "Knock on Wood", where he spends just about every moment he's not singing urging the crowd to get up and clap their hands. Carla Thomas reaches even further back, peppering her extensive set with a roll call of r&b's phases in the 60s, from 1960's post-doo-wop classic "Gee Whiz (Look at His Eyes)" (which gets an absolutely rapturous response from the first syllable) to 1966's slice of prime Hayes/Porter r&b "B-A-B-Y" to the churning, Southern-fried soul-funk of 1969's "I Like What You're Doing (To Me)". And Carla's father Rufus, one of Stax's first hitmakers and a graying 55 at the time, commands the stage with a rapid-fire succession of his iconic dance-craze songs-- likeably dippy novelties on record, but live they were the catalyst for a glorious stage-rushing Funky Chicken contest. The post-Atlantic hitmakers are just as powerful. The Bar-Kays hit the ground running with a medley of "Son of Shaft" and "Feel It": the former is a funk explosion that makes the original Isaac Hayes composition sound like an exercise in restraint, while the latter is a sick, organ-heavy extended vamp with a memorably lascivious monologue ("I'm told that havin' fun is like havin' sex: That is, the more you put in to it, the more you're gonna get out of it"). David Porter, who started coming into his own as a performer at the end of the 60s after years of songwriting, is featured in a 20-plus-minute orchestral soul suite that devotes ten and a half minutes to the heartbreak ballad "Can't See You When I Want To", the most epic and gut-wrenching performance included in the set. And Johnnie Taylor-- who had 12 r&b top 10 singles for Stax from 1968 to 1974-- turns his slinky, sly love song "Steal Away" into smooth, upbeat proto-disco that sees Philadelphia International cresting over the horizon and fires right back. Where the new box set differs greatly from previous records devoted to the concert is in its breadth, especially with unreleased performances. Over a third of the material here is previously unavailable, and much of it is devoted to the also-ran artists that never cracked the r&b top ten but didn't fail for lack of trying: belter Lee Sain's gut-bucket contribution to the Great Hot Pants Frenzy of 1971, "Them Hot Pants"; the Temprees' velvety falsetto showcase "Explain it to Her Mama"; Louise McCord's raw, Aretha-esque "Better Get a Move On". You could come to the conclusion that a few of these come at the expense of a few crucial omissions, some more forgivable than others; Isaac Hayes is represented solely by "Theme from Shaft" (though a more complete set is available on the must-have Isaac Hayes at Wattstax), while Luther Ingram's smoldering infidelity ode "If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Want to Be Right)" is only available on the Wattstax: Highlights from the Soundtrack comp that this set makes mostly redundant. But that's searching for complaints. The box set still captures the concert's spirit intact, and the Reverend Jackson's introduction delivers as precise a summary as you'd hope for: "We know that music is music, all of our people got a soul, our experience determines the texture, the taste, and the sound of our soul...all of us are one people, singin' our music, popping our fingers and doing our thing."

2007-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00

2007-08-31T02:00:02.000-04:00

Stax

August 31, 2007

041a943c-faf2-48f6-85a5-83ef1426b3fc

Nate Patrin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/

On her fourth studio album, Greta Kline gamely stares down her middle twenties, that messy period where one’s early projections about the future tend to start unraveling.

On her fourth studio album, Greta Kline gamely stares down her middle twenties, that messy period where one’s early projections about the future tend to start unraveling.

Frankie Cosmos: Close It Quietly

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/frankie-cosmos-close-it-quietly/

Close it Quietly

Greta Kline’s early work as Frankie Cosmos earned the New York songwriter a reputation as a dazzling twee prodigy, a teenager who deftly encapsulated the weighty uncertainties of humanity in two-minute bites of melody. On her EP Fit Me In, the followup to 2014’s breakout album Zentropy, she mocked her own press coverage, which seemed more preoccupied with her age then her work: “Have you heard? I am so young.” Every Frankie Cosmos album since has felt like an attempt to take stock of what transpired since Kline’s last release, with moving meditations on touring, friendships, and the alienation of being a public-facing figure keen on safeguarding her private life. On Close It Quietly, her fourth studio LP and second Sub Pop release, she gamely stares down her middle twenties, that messy period where one’s early projections about the future tend to start unraveling. Kline’s language has always been the tightly coiled heart of her work, and here she offers a wealth of indelible imagery that smears together the winsome and the grotesque. “Spit out diamonds/Cough up rubies,” she sings blithely on the chorus to “Windows,” a beguiling couplet that offers no window onto her interior state. The song’s peppy, full-band instrumentation recedes at the hook, an inversion of typical power-pop song dynamics—the synthesizers melt away and Kline’s voice darkens, supported by little but the tick of a cymbal. “I wanna give you all my marbles,” she offers over a spare fingerpicked guitar on “Marbles,” twisting an old phrase until it becomes an expression of generosity rather than instability: If she’s going to lose her marbles, she might as well give them away. On “So Blue,” she envisions a cheery sky soaking the whole world in its melancholic hue (blue’s only a happy color when it doesn’t touch the ground). And with “A Joke,” Kline enlists wildflowers in an embrace of her own chaos: “Flowers don’t grow/In an organized way/Why should I?” She observes a field of dandelions and then pans down to where they’re strangling the soil, imbuing a well-worn image with new ferocity. Listening to Frankie Cosmos, I hold up the person I was at 19 and the one I was at 25, a six-year chasm full of molting and tumult that the first self never could have foreseen. I had a good sense of self in my late teens, and then I shed it, and shed what replaced it. Kline wades fearlessly into that process of continual unearthing, casting off what used to make sense and what doesn’t anymore—old relationships, old habits, old vantages on a world that grows more complex by the day. Close It Quietly is honest about the pain of rebirth, but it doesn’t dwell there. Kline’s more interested in what grows out of that mess. Buy: Rough Trade (Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)

2019-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

2019-09-09T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

Sub Pop

September 9, 2019

041b782d-20b2-42fd-88a0-075cd57578fd

Sasha Geffen

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sasha-geffen/

Inspired by soul singers like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, the D.C.-born singer puts a modern spin on classic concepts. His genre-bending debut operates at a fever pitch.

Inspired by soul singers like Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield, the D.C.-born singer puts a modern spin on classic concepts. His genre-bending debut operates at a fever pitch.

Nick Hakim: Green Twins

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/23239-green-twins/

Green Twins

Nick Hakim songs brim with yearning. There are glimpses of lovers, both lost and present, but he emphasizes the feelings they impart in specific moments. This was the hallmark of his early standout, “Cold,” a break-up song that longed for a reconciliation that would never come, settling for the memory of her smile and gaze. Each of Hakim’s scenes carries singular flourishes, like the souring regret that can come with nostalgia, or the blush of a daydream. These details all bear love’s pull—lusty remarks, frenzied expressions, delicate tremors, caught in the thrall of romance. Hakim’s debut album, Green Twins, is a shrine to these entanglements made entirely of soft-spoken love songs that erupt into psychedelic hymnals. Growing up in D.C., Hakim’s parents would sing and play nueva canción, the socially-charged folk music of South America. Meanwhile, his older brother was deeply immersed in the city’s vibrant punk scene, and introduced him to the Clash and district legends like Fugazi and Bad Brains. Hakim’s friends were in go-go bands and he sat in on rehearsals. It all shaped his formative years. Nourished by a rigorous musical background, Hakim landed at Berklee College of Music, and as a student, he released Where Will We Go, a two-part project about isolation, intoxication, and how they feed each other. Those arrangements were more hushed and still, but Green Twins is full of life and energy, often operating at a fever pitch. Inspired by soul singers with an intimate understanding of both the conscious and the sensual—Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and D’Angelo among them—Hakim evokes the bluesy heart and gospel tinge of soul music. His songs are indelibly marked by the genre’s forebearers, but there are nods to the sounds of his youth, too. It all might recall the rawness of Archy Marshall’s Zoo Kid phase, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s psych soul fusions, or Miguel’s “Adorn.” Hakim clearly likes modern takes on classic concepts. “TYAF” and “Bet She Looks Like You” burn traits from neo-psychedelia down into kindling for Hakim’s potent ruminations on the divine. After surging into a steady groove, “Miss Chew” opens in the middle, hollowing out for scattering sax blurts. These are genre-bending songs that find communion in love’s simple truths. Reflective and forgiving, they treat soul like a remedy. Hakim studied music therapy at Berklee, a major that encompassed theory, composition, and arranging along with clinical skills, and Green Twins has a therapeutic quality. Every reflection, dressed with hums and coos, feels healing, stewing until it finds catharsis. The most intimate moments unravel as hazy reveries. As summery guitar licks and billowing bass bubble into a current of shrieks on “Slowly,” it’s rapturous. Hakim writhes in pleasure, recalling a fantasy, wrapped in the throes of ecstasy as the song swells toward its climax. On “Cuffed,” he relives being devoted and lovestruck—or cuffed—as his enchantress, literally cuffed to her mother’s bed, lies in wait. In its final minutes, it slows to a chug with Hakim reciting the same lyrics like a mantra. The rich brew of tones and textures is intoxicating: Shrinking refrains give way to colossal, layered arrangements; whispers and wails give voice to bliss. For all the intimacy and sentimentality knotted in every phrase, these songs aren’t so much about what Hakim sings as how he sings them. On “Needy Bees,” his light rasp producing a gentle reverb. On “Farmissplease,” he sways from a falsetto into a whine. Every note is used precisely; when he isn’t drawing outlines with long breaths, as if trying to fill a room, his singing cowers into whimpers, forcing closer listening. The dynamics help construct Hakim’s plush sonic sanctum, and they add depth to his vignettes of old (and ongoing) flames. In the last minutes of Green Twins, on “The Want,” his harmonies crescendo into a melismatic collage, conveying passion and how unsustainable it can be. As the song ends abruptly, there’s a sense that Hakim has been trying to summon something lost, but is suddenly snapped out of it. The songs on Green Twins feel like attempts to save remnants of the cherished encounters that fill up a lifetime. So few of these moments last long. But Nick Hakim has set out to preserve his any way possible.

2017-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

2017-05-23T01:00:00.000-04:00

Rock

ATO

May 23, 2017

041c6a62-d4d9-44f1-b839-2d342c53cf7b

Sheldon Pearce

https://pitchfork.com/staff/sheldon-pearce/

After several years of singles and an EP, the NYC-based electro-pop outfit makes its full-length debut.

After several years of singles and an EP, the NYC-based electro-pop outfit makes its full-length debut.

Holy Ghost!: Holy Ghost!

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15227-holy-ghost/

Holy Ghost!

As much as the standard model has shifted from the full-length album to the individual track, there's still a lot of baggage to the phrase "singles band." A group with a couple of great songs and a few unremarkable ones might've gotten more of a pass for hiding the mediocrities on B-sides back when "sides" were the only game in town, but the nature of an album still has a certain weight to the idea of consistent front-to-back listening that doesn't forgive hitches so easily. Still, even though Holy Ghost! have followed up a string of singles and an EP (2010's Static on the Wire) with an album where the big stumbling blocks are redundancy and an overextension of a few good ideas, it's surprisingly easy to toss those concerns aside and just go for the choice stuff piecemeal-style. Holy Ghost! do have a good amount of choice stuff, actually, at least if you've warmed to the idea of a band that does for 1980s electro-pop and some of the era's more forward-thinking AOR what the Juan MacLean did for deep house. But it depends on how much you take in at once. That's another paradox of a singles band-- put a bit of chronological distance between a few soundalike tracks, and the water-treading doesn't seem so bad. On an album, it's easy to notice that, say, the lyrical conceit of "Hold On"'s hook is recycled for the bridge on "Say My Name" ("Hold on, hold on, hold on/ Even though you know you shouldn't"). But with a few years separating those tracks' original releases, the original impressions hinged more on a stylistic progression from the former's chirpy yet suave electro-pop to the latter's frosty, anxious, and immaculately mannered minimal new wave. That's why it's a bit harder to parse the tracks that make their debut on the album. A few of these stand out immediately. There's "Jam for Jerry", a subtly guilt-stricken yet touching tribute to drummer Jerry Fuchs, and "Some Children", which not only drops a youth chorus on your head but throws in an honest-to-god Michael McDonald appearance on the chorus to boot. Both sound like textbook Factory-replica synthpop with faint underpinnings of Fourth and Broadway-eclectic dance music and R&B. Think Chromeo with a straighter face. But these songs have enough staying power in their catchiness to feel distinct so long as you keep them isolated from each other. And the songs on Holy Ghost! you might've heard already still hold up, whether after 3 1/2 years (the aforementioned "Hold On") or just under one, like the yearning electro-funk of Static on the Wire's title track, reintroduced here. Other tracks aren't so lucky when strung in succession, and the familiar, unchallenging pleasures of each individual song-- the semi-industrial churn of "Do It Again", the piano-flecked Jellybean Benitez pop-lock of "Wait and See", the aloof disco of "Slow Motion"-- are quickly canceled out by the next, losing detail and impact in the cumulative procession. That'll come with time, and there's plenty of momentum to grasp hold of when the music's actually playing. But the "I need to hear this again right away" jolt might not grab on for good. While Holy Ghost! don't have the compositional knack of Hot Chip or Cut Copy, Alex Frankel's cool, reserved, yet subtly emotional vocals and the duo's solid knack for no-bullshit dance grooves are served well by a consistent mood of tense detachment-- the sort of mildly intriguing disconnect that comes with the combination of upbeat synthpop and downbeat lyrical ennui. It's not always the most distinct lyrical ennui, granted, with words that don't get any less vague than the titles and sentiments that often need to be heard between the lines. Just meet it all halfway, and it'll be fine. As slippery and elusive as this album's thrills can be, they'll eventually fall into place, one track at a time.

2011-04-01T02:00:03.000-04:00

2011-04-01T02:00:03.000-04:00

Electronic / Rock

DFA

April 1, 2011

041d8aa9-e3d1-416d-91bd-fea0627ce8b5

Nate Patrin

https://pitchfork.com/staff/nate-patrin/

On his 12th album, Bill Callahan relies almost exclusively on acoustic strumming and easy melodies, forsaking much of the biting cynicism of his more highly regarded work.

On his 12th album, Bill Callahan relies almost exclusively on acoustic strumming and easy melodies, forsaking much of the biting cynicism of his more highly regarded work.

Smog: A River Ain't Too Much to Love

https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/7286-a-river-aint-too-much-to-love/

A River Ain't Too Much to Love

Bill Callahan, the man behind Smog's dark, conflicted narratives, is often critically thought to be "enigmatic"-- mainly because he addresses frequently passionate subjects with dispassion. In that sense, the tag becomes more like shorthand to describe a singer-songwriter who doesn't spill his every weepy desire. But I've never really bought into the idea that Callahan is an exotic, unknowable creature, and I've never bought into the idea that his work has to be inscrutable (or let's be more rock critic-y and say "inaccessible") to be effective. Even at his least explicit, Callahan's music comes across as an honest assessment of its creator. For that, he's sometimes also labeled a jerk and a misogynist, among other things, but that may be the price of doing business for an artist who refuses to paint himself in the rosy hues of everlasting love or the antique sepia of "heartfelt" loss-- in short, refusing to paint over his own complexity. The existential nature of Callahan's music has been touched on before, as he presents himself allegorically in his albums-- a hash of emotions, desires, and needs, frequently uncertain of the world beyond the nose on his face, aware only of himself and his mortality, and, most crucially, drawing his own detached security directly from that awareness. He gets called an enigma because he resembles a human being in a medium where people are used to seeing caricatures. And all that is just a way of excusing the kinder, gentler Smog that has settled in on 2003's Supper and now A River Ain't Too Much to Love, Callahan's 12th proper album. The more confrontational sound of early Smog-- the distinct instrumentation and the sometimes sardonic and sometimes nasty edge-- has been blunted, whether by age or simply a desire to not repeat himself. Instead, Callahan relies almost exclusively on acoustic strumming and easy melodies, forsaking much of the biting cynicism of his more highly regarded work. Although not as compelling as his more subversive material, this softening of his sound doesn't carry the negative connotation of an artist losing steam later in his career; Callahan's distinctive baritone and cutting inflection are unchanging and iconic, and show that this sensitive appearance is just one more spin of the kaleidoscope. As Callahan deadpans on "I'm New Here", "I did not become someone different.../ No matter how far wrong you've gone/ You can always turn around." For the gentleness of its tone, a listen to "Say Valley Maker" makes clear the message here: "Bury me in wood, and I will splinter/ Bury me in stone, and I will quake/ Bury me in water, and I will geyser/ Bury me in fire, and I'm gonna phoenix". It's about transcendence after death, or-- for a man so clearly wrapped up in his own mortality in the past-- one of peace after the tumult of confronting that mortality. On previous records, after tossing a broken bottle into the woods-- frustrated because he couldn't work to open "The Well"-- Callahan-as-Camus might've mused on the inconsequence or futility of the act. Here, he still throws the bottle, but suffers pangs of conscience, feeling sorry "for the doe-paw, and the rabbit-paw," and goes looking for the shards. Callahan's a bit new to this sort of territory, occasionally tripping over some surprisingly hokey imagery, and it may not suit those who crave the immediate emotional impact of his more tormented work. But, like any other Smog album, it would be incomplete if it pandered to a one-dimensional view of its creator. In that sense, A River Ain't Too Much to Love makes perfect sense. An album that might be superficially seen as inappropriately becalmed, in its own subdued way, feels instead like life welling up where it had once been suppressed, as human as anything Callahan has ever done.

2005-06-08T02:00:01.000-04:00

2005-06-08T02:00:01.000-04:00

Rock

Drag City

June 8, 2005

041f6d64-43fe-4978-aacf-bc4a3ffac5e7

Eric Carr

https://pitchfork.com/staff/eric-carr/